Don’t Lean In. Opt Out

Manifestoes for working women, much like working women themselves, are often held to an impossibly high standard. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was a best-seller, but critics—male and female—tore it apart because it asked women alone to fix their broken work environment. The criticism is valid; Sandberg has since admitted that it would be hard for a single mother to follow her advice. And yet male-authored advice books hardly get torn apart for failing to address intersectionality, privilege, and structural racism and sexism along with tips on how to climb the corporate ladder.

Sallie Krawcheck wants us to know, even before we open Own It: The Power of Women at Work (Crown Business, $27), that she excels in the face of such impossible standards—in heels, no less. The cover features Krawcheck, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Ellevest, an online investment service for women, perched atop a stepladder in black stilettos. Krawcheck gets how difficult it is for women to break into the executive class. She worked her way up in the banking industry, only to be let go from C-suite jobs at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. Reflecting on her tenure at Citigroup, which ended about nine years ago, she says she believes gender played a major role in the tensions she experienced. The final straw, Krawcheck writes, came when she made an unpopular suggestion that she believed was in the company’s best interest: reimbursing some Citigroup customers for losses they’d suffered in the early days of the 2008 financial crisis.