How does she do it?

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead - Book review

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

By Sheryl Sandberg

Knopf. 228 pages. $24.95.

Let's start with the obvious stuff. Sheryl Sandberg is clearly a member of the 1 percent. She was an early hire at Google, before she became one of the few women to reach the very highest floors of the corporate office tower, as the COO of Facebook.

It's not just that Sandberg herself is very, very rich. Her mentor, Larry Summers, is a chief architect of the policies that created the 1 percent in the first place. While Summers was Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary and Sandberg was his chief of staff, Summers was busy pushing bank deregulation and other economic policies that have helped dramatically separate the mega-rich from ordinary working Americans.

So there is an inherent disconnect between Sandberg's call for a more humane, family-friendly workplace and the values of the intersecting worlds of business and government she comes out of.

In Lean In, Sandberg acknowledges that her life is very different from that of most working women.

"I am fully aware that most women are ... simply trying to get through each day," she writes. "Forty percent of employed mothers lack sick days and vacation leave, and about 50 percent of employed mothers are unable to take time off to care for a sick child. Only about half of women receive any pay during maternity leave.... Too many work standards remain inflexible and unfair, often penalizing women with children."

Her answer: more women in leadership positions.

"We must raise both the ceiling and the floor," Sandberg writes. That seems only reasonable.

But Sandberg doesn't really address how the current structure of the economy, which has so richly rewarded her and her employers, is driving the floor ever lower for most women.

Reading Sandberg, I couldn't help but remember how Summers, along with his colleagues Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan, hounded another smart, assertive woman, Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, when Born had the temerity to warn them that the government was negligent for not exercising oversight over the multi-trillion-dollar derivatives market.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It would be interesting to read what Sandberg thinks about that.

And it would have been interesting to know how she has maintained such a great lifelong relationship with Larry "girls can't do math" Summers, whose arrogance, especially toward women, is legendary and whose tone-deaf remarks about...