Lean In

reached over and patted my head. He turned to the congressman and remarked, “She’s pretty.” Then he turned his attention back to me and asked just one question: “Are you a pom-pom girl?”
    I was crushed. Looking back, I know his words were intended to flatter me, but in the moment, I felt belittled. I wanted to be recognized for the work I had done. I reacted defensively. “No,” I replied. “I study too much for that.” Then a wave of terror struck me for speaking up to the man who was third in line for the presidency. But no one seemed to register my curt and not-at-all clever response. The Speaker just patted me on the head—again!—and moved along. My congressman beamed.
    Even to my teenage self, this sexism seemed retro. The Speaker was born in 1912, eight years before women were given the right to vote, but by the time I met him in the halls of Congress, society had (mostly) evolved. It was obvious that a woman could do anything a man could do. My childhood was filled with firsts—Golda Meir in Israel, Geraldine Ferraro on the Mondale ticket, Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, Sally Ride in space.
    Given all these strides, I headed into college believing that the feminists of the sixties and seventies had done the hard work of achieving equality for my generation. And yet, if anyone had called me a feminist, I would have quickly correctedthat notion. This reaction is prevalent even today according to sociologist Marianne Cooper (who also contributed her extraordinary research assistance to this book). In her 2011 article, “The New F-Word,” Marianne wrote about college English professor Michele Elam, who observed something strange in her Introduction to Feminist Studies course. Even though her students were interested enough in gender equality to take an entire class on the subject, very few “felt comfortable using the word ‘feminism.’ ” And even “fewer identified themselves as feminists.” As Professor Elam noted, it was as if “being called a feminist was to suspect that some foul epithet had been hurled your way.” 2
    It sounds like a joke: Did you hear the one about the woman taking a feminist studies class who got angry when someone called her a feminist? But when I was in college, I embraced the same contradiction. On one hand, I started a group to encourage more women to major in economics and government. On the other hand, I would have denied being in any way, shape, or form a feminist. None of my college friends thought of themselves as feminists either. It saddens me to admit that we did not see the backlash against women around us. 3 We accepted the negative caricature of a bra-burning, humorless, man-hating feminist. She was not someone we wanted to emulate, in part because it seemed like she couldn’t get a date. Horrible, I know—the sad irony of rejecting feminism to get male attention and approval. In our defense, my friends and I truly, if naïvely, believed that the world did not need feminists anymore. We mistakenly thought that there was nothing left to fight for.
    I carried this attitude with me when I entered the workforce. I figured if sexism still existed, I would just prove it wrong. I would do my job and do it well. What I didn’t know at the time was that ignoring the issue is a classic survival technique. Within traditional institutions, success has often been contingent upon a woman not speaking out but fitting in, or morecolloquially, being “one of the guys.” The first women to enter corporate America dressed in manly suits with button-down shirts. One veteran banking executive told me that she wore her hair in a bun for ten years because she did not want anyone to notice she was a woman. While styles have relaxed, women still worry about sticking out too much. I know an engineer at a tech start-up who removes her earrings before going to work so coworkers won’t be reminded that she is—
shhh!
—not a man.
    Early in my career, my gender was rarely noted (except for the occasional client who wanted to fix me up with his son). Manly suits were no longer in fashion, and I neither hid nor emphasized femininity. I have never reported directly to a woman—not once in my entire career. There were higher-level women at the places I worked, but I wasn’t close enough to see how they dealt with this issue on a daily basis. I was never invited to attend a single meeting that discussed gender, and there were no special programs for women