Lean Out: The Truth About Women, Power, and the Workplace

by Marissa Orr

A corporate hierarchy has a specific, unspoken set of rules for winning. One of the biggest: pretending to know everything will get you way further than actually knowing anything.

Number 4 on the list: we were already the CEOs of our households and often felt unappreciated for our efforts, so we were ambivalent about seeking promotions; it seemed like more responsibility for even less acknowledgment.

The win-lose games of a corporate hierarchy erode the very thing that makes women strong. Corporations are structured as competitions not because they’re superior to all other arrangements, but because they were created by men, through a male worldview, at a time when virtually no women were in the workforce. Women are under the microscope for their failure to play by men’s rules, instead of everyone stepping back and recognizing that the world has changed, and the rules are no longer working.

When people don’t know or agree on what it means to do a good job, doing something becomes the barometer for success. It doesn’t matter how useless the something may be—what matters is how many somethings you did and how bold they appeared.

Real empowerment is about knowing who you are and how to fulfill your unique needs and desires.

Lean out doesn’t mean quit your job or check out mentally. It means leaning out of anyone else’s story of who you should be and what a successful career looks like. It’s a rejection of dogma and rhetoric.