We Leaned In. Now What?

Even for Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who spoke with Bloomberg Businessweek about the fifth anniversary of her book, Lean In, gender issues in the workplace are difficult to talk about. With the book, Sandberg was one of the earliest to raise the call to heed women’s voices, and to that end, she succeeded. In 2012, a year before the book’s release, a survey by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that a little more than half of all U.S. companies considered it a priority to hire and retain women; today that number is 90 percent. Roughly a fifth of all major companies now teach employees about unconscious bias, or why, for example, ambitious men are said to have “leadership skills” but ambitious women are “bossy.”

Many women have stories that, like these statistics, point to incremental change. But in the aggregate, there’s still much work to be done. Worldwide, gender-based pay disparity has hardly budged; ditto the amount of housework women are expected to perform, the number of U.S. companies offering paid family leave, and the number of women CEOs in the Fortune 500. “We had a lot of work to do then, and we have a lot of work to do now,” Sandberg says. “Until we started talking about it, I think people didn’t quite realize how slow the progress was.”