printAs this individualist sees it, Sheryl Sandberg is a remarkable woman who holds unremarkable opinions. There is nothing remotely controversial about what the chief operating officer of Facebook, a Democrat, has said about women’s work on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
Women are too nice. They don’t take credit for their greatness. They don’t raise their hand enough. They don’t “Lean In” (the trite title of Sandberg’s new book) as they should. They “attribute their success to luck, and help from other people,” while men will attribute their success to their own core skills.
Sandberg holds humdrum feminist views. According to this mainstream opinion, society and the patriarchy have conditioned women to be nurturing and apologize for any male-like, go-getter ambitions they harbor.
Interviewer Norah O’Donnell is the very embodiment of banality—and hypocrisy. O’Donnell’s beauty (she is certainly no brainiac) could not have damaged her career on the Idiot Box. Just in case her looks—sorry, “skills”—went unnoticed, O’Donnell has posed as a pin-up.
In any case, O’Donnell the pin-up was having none of it. “But some women will hear that and say, ‘Wow, she’s telling me I’m not working hard enough, I’m not trying hard enough. She’s blaming women…”
Matthew Cooper is another feminist with a Y (chromosome). Cooper took a tougher tack. So sinister were Sandberg’s pronouncements on women that she deserved to be exposed for all the bad (unrelated) things she’d done. Some of these were implied: “She made a billion” was a recrimination of sorts.
Some were asserted: Mr. Cooper saddles Sandberg with the deregulation of the financial sector [where? When?] and the financial crisis. She was only 30 when she helped “repeal the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that had separated investment banking from the commercial, insured kind. This was, in retrospect, a huge mistake,” noodles Cooper.
This is such bad journalism.
To those of use who put a premium on teasing out the issues with precision, there is no daylight between Sheryl Sandberg and her feminist foes.
Sheryl Sandberg is being sandbagged for forgetting the only acceptable meme: Saddle “society” and the “patriarchy” for any and all female failure.
Nobody has picked on Sandberg for failing to blame biology, which accounts to a greater degree for the observed, aggregate differences in drive and priority setting that separate the sexes.
NORA O’Donnell Showcasing Her Professional Skills :
