In March 2013, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In, which offered women advice for how to keep their professional careers on the fast track without compromising their personal ambitions, including having children. While her book has been instrumental for bringing some of the complexities and contradictions of working motherhood to the forefront of public discourse, many believe that she blames working women’s poor professional and personal choices (made both before and after having children) for their “mommy-tracked” positions and lack of opportunity for advancing their mid-stage careers. Sandberg’s advice, framed within post-feminist rhetorics of “choice” and privilege, simultaneously emboldened and enraged readers, and became fodder for thousands of editorials, blog discussions, and online reader comments. More than a year later, the deliberation about working mothers, workplace culture, and whether anyone can actually achieve work-life balance has continued to rage on in a number of public forums.
The primary aim of this paper is to better understand the public dialogue about working motherhood sparked by Lean In, and the potential to envision a more progressive and inclusive notion of gender equality (both at home and in the workplace) that moves beyond such working mother-blaming discourse. These online interactions, I argue, bridge cultural divides and open up possibilities for re-imagining ways of talking about the institutional and patriarchal bias in workplace culture that keep women from achieving professional success, and opportunities to increase social capital for working mothers that do not place the responsibility solely on women’s “choice.”
