
Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In” - soundsop
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/05/12/lean-in/
======
therealarmen
Those who enjoy this review will also enjoy Philip's review [1] of "Straight
from the Gut" by Jack Welch (former CEO of GE):

 _If you want to learn the names of every person who ever worked at GE during
Jack Welch's 40 years there, you'll find this book invaluable. If you want to
learn something about what made GE successful, however, good luck picking out
the few saplings of wisdom from the thick forest of names. Golf and tennis
fans will also find the book fascinating for its endless catalog of golf and
tennis resorts nationwide. Apparently being anywhere near the top at GE
requires moving to Fairfield, Connecticut and aping the Lifestyles of the
Bland and WASPy.

One interesting thing I learned is that GE went from 0 percent employee
ownership to 31 percent during Jack Welch's tenure as CEO, primarily through
granting of stock options to top managers such as Jack himself. Jack doesn't
talk about this except to say that he's proud of the number. He doesn't get
into the question of whether the investors from 1980 are happy now that they
own less than 70 percent of the company. Nor does he talk about what would
have happened to GE's earnings if they'd accounted for all of these stock
options at time of issue.

The useful and interesting content in this book could have been presented in
75 pages if the editors and ghostwriter had been doing their jobs. But they
weren't doing their jobs. So the readers all have to "give 110 percent" or
"give 1000 percent". Maybe this is what Jack Welch wanted because he uses
these expressions numerous times throughout Straight from the Gut._

[1] <http://www.amazon.com/Jack-Straight-Gut-Welch/dp/0446690686>

~~~
sinnerswing
His reviews would've been a lot funnier if Arsdigita didn't crash and burn
years ago.

>He doesn't get into the question of whether the investors from 1980 are happy
now that they own less than 70 percent of the company.

They should be happy considering GE's value rose 4000% during Jack Welch's
tenure at GE.[1]

When Jack Welch became General Electric’s CEO in 1981, the company was worth
about $14 billion. When he retired 20 years later, GE was worth nearly $500
billion.[2]

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch>

[2][http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/jack-welch-
and-...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/jack-welch-and-the-lone-
ranger-theory/)

~~~
jseliger
_His reviews would've been a lot funnier if Arsdigita didn't crash and burn
years ago._

On the other hand, it's famously uncertain as to whether that's his fault:
<http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/> . I haven't seen a compelling rebuttal of
this narrative.

~~~
sinnerswing
It's his company, he was the CEO. It's his fault.

~~~
rdl
It's not the CEO's fault if he gets fired/forced out and then the bad stuff
happens, though.

------
temphn
This is utterly devastating and long overdue. Sandberg makes $845 million in a
year (at a company she didn't found), lives a charmed life, and is promoted
aggressively by men...yet has managed to convince herself that the world
is/was biased against women.

But even Greenspan is prevented by polite convention from making the obvious
point: women and men have different chromosomal structures, lifespans, organs,
and hormone levels. There's also substantial evidence[1,2] that they differ in
average levels of spatial, verbal, and mathematical reasoning ability (with
women generally having an advantage in verbal and men in
visuospatial/mathematical). We should not expect them to have the same
outcomes on average.

Women also can only have at most 10-20 children over their lifespan, whereas
men like Genghis Khan[3] can have a virtually unbounded number. This is why
males have a greater evolutionary payoff for high-risk, high-reward behavior:
intrinsically higher reproductive variance.

But hey. That's evolution, and even though it provides a consilient
explanation for a variety of allied phenomena, everyone knows that doesn't and
couldn't apply to human beings (we all well know what happens to people who
propose that a behavior has _genetic_ influences). It is instead easier to
pretend that humans aren't biological creatures with hard biological
constraints.

Yet if your premises are wrong, one is simply practicing fashionable
creationism. And that is where we are today, presented with the spectacle of a
privileged billionairess who lashes out at phantasms rather than wrestling
with the realities of molecular biology. Why not lean in to a publication on
behavioral neuroendocrinology, for a change?

[1]: <http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm>

[2]: [http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-
Brizendine/dp/0767...](http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-
Brizendine/dp/0767920104)

[3]:
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_genghis.html)

[4]: [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-
diff...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-
differences/201101/which-sex-is-playing-higher-stakes-reproductive-game)

~~~
jackowayed
The reason that people are berated for suggesting inherent differences is that
there's so much more to the story. Almost nothing derives purely from genes;
it's a complex interaction of genes, epigenetics (environmental and hereditary
factors other than genes that control which genes are active), and
socialization.

Males and females are treated extremely differently _from birth_. Literally,
in the very first day. Thus, it is nearly impossible to actually prove
scientifically that a significant difference comes from genetic and biological
factors. The socialization is a confounding factor that's impossible to
separate out unless you're willing to do a study where you raise kids in
isolation from society so you can treat them identically.

And even "inherent" differences are often easily overcome with social
solutions. There's research to suggest that the difference in spatial
reasoning is societal.[1] Furthermore, I believe I saw a study suggesting that
even in our society, if you put everyone through a proper course teaching them
spatial reasoning, the women catch up to the men. So society can choose to
eliminate "inherent" differences by devoting a few resources to something that
helps one group catch up to the other.

Furthermore, it ultimately doesn't matter that much. Western society has
decided that we want equality between men and women. If that's not happening,
then we've committed ourselves to make it happen. There are currently
differences between men and women, largely from socialization. Since our
society was largely built by men, it unsurprisingly is oriented toward having
successful men in it. That doesn't mean we throw up our hands and say, "well,
this is how our society is structured, and our society socializes men to win
in that structure. I guess equality is inherently impossible." No. We find
ways to reduce gender socialization (see: radical schools in Sweden). We find
ways to restructure society so that there are fewer barriers to some groups'
success.

1:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/7fk/gender_differences_in_spatial_re...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/7fk/gender_differences_in_spatial_reasoning_appear_to/)

~~~
temphn
You don't link to actual molecular genetic research on behavior and sex
differences. I will. Let's do two quick examples.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/science/studying-recent-
hu...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/science/studying-recent-human-
evolution-at-the-genetic-level.html?_r=0)

    
    
      Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers 
      have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the 
      source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians 
      different from other races.
    
      The traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, 
      characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts — 
      are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about 
      35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded.
    

One pleiotropic mutation actually causes smaller breasts, among other things.
For added visual impact, take a look at the EDAR transgenic mouse:

[http://mathildasanthropologyblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/10...](http://mathildasanthropologyblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/picture-2-741394.png)

Wow! Across _species_ , you can actually see that a single variant makes the
mouse hair look East Asian. It's so crazily reductionist, it looks like what a
troglodyte like Strom Thurmond might sketch if you had him draw an "Asian-
looking mouse". Here's another great one, Fruitless:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitless_(gene)#Function>

    
    
      Although many genes are known to be involved in male 
      courtship behavior, the fruitless gene has been considered 
      noteworthy because it exhibits sex-specific alternative 
      splicing. When females produce the male-spliced gene 
      product, they behave as males. Males that do not produce 
      the male-specific product do not court females and are 
      infertile.[1] ... The fruitless gene locus also controls 
      the expression of hundreds of other genes,[6] any subset of 
      which may actually regulate behavior.
    

We don't yet know the human analog of Fruitless, the master regulator of sex
differences. But if it exists, it's a good bet that it's on the Y or X
chromosomes.

Point: it's not all super-complex gene-environment interactionism that we'll
never understand[1]. Indeed, as Fruitless or the EDAR story show, the genetic
origins of complex gender differences and/or behavioral traits can be almost
cartoonishly reductionist, attributable to a single master upstream regulator!

So: do you really want to bet it all on black, bet that genetics researchers
aren't going to find governing loci for human gender differences and/or sexual
orientation, bet that it's 100% social construction? Because if you know
anything about where genomics is going, that is a bet you are going to lose.

[1] PS: I love it when people bring up _epistasis_ , for god's sake, as a sort
of catch-all neo-Lamarckianism, reached for like a drowning sailor flailing
for a life preserver. Methylome much? Didn't think so.

EDIT: You know what? Let's actually go line by line on this thing.

    
    
      Males and females are treated extremely differently from 
      birth. Literally, in the very first day. Thus, it is nearly 
      impossible to actually prove scientifically that a 
      significant difference comes from genetic and biological 
      factors. 
    

Science: doing the impossible since ten years ago. Behold, gene expression
analysis of innate male/female neurological differences _before birth_ , known
since 2003 (and well before):

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031022062408.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031022062408.htm)

    
    
      Using two genetic testing methods, they compared the 
      production of genes in male and female brains in embryonic 
      mice — long before the animals developed sex organs.
    
      To their surprise, the researchers found 54 genes produced 
      in different amounts in male and female mouse brains, prior 
      to hormonal influence. Eighteen of the genes were produced 
      at higher levels in the male brains; 36 were produced at 
      higher levels in the female brains.
    
      “We didn’t expect to find genetic differences between the  
      sexes’ brains,” Vilain said. “But we discovered that the 
      male and female brains differed in many measurable ways, 
      including anatomy and function.”
    

How about this little flail-for-a-life-preserver:

    
    
      There's research to suggest that the difference in spatial 
      reasoning is societal.
    

Which in turn links to this paper:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/19/1015182108.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/19/1015182108.full.pdf)

This is almost a caricature of academia. To come to the conclusion that gender
differences in spatial rotation ability are "culturally influenced"...they
analyze two tribes in Northeast India on a "spatial puzzle" that has never
been administered to anyone before (Figure 1). And in Table 1 the mean puzzle
solving time for men in the "matrilineal" society is still actually lower than
that for females, even though the medians point the other way.

Forget about the crimes against psychometry that such a test perpetrates. It
goes without saying that they did not compute test-retest reliabilities or do
a proper battery of spatial tests, let alone estimate IRT parameters for their
single idiosyncratic "spatial" item. And this innocence of all aspects of
item-response theory is confirmed by their supplementary information
(<http://goo.gl/ltysD>).

The more fundamental point is the lack of thinking. Not only does this study
cut against the grain of literally hundreds of other datasets, it is
intentionally designed to not be reproducible. Among other things, why else
would one use such an obscure population? And why not use the standard
Shepard/Metzler test, in which one is actually mentally rotating two objects
and seeing if they correspond? One can programmatically vary the rotation
parameter to increase the difficulty, and Shepard famously even observed that
reaction time varies linearly with rotation angle
([http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/mental-
rota...](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/mental-
rotation.html)), as if people were actually rotating the objects slowly in
their heads.

Anyway. You know what is reproducible? Let's consult this handy meta-analysis
of 70 studies...

<http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-012-9215-x>

It shows a huge and _reproducible_ spatial rotation ability difference between
men and women. Don't believe me? Put up a web-based test with WebGL, pay
participants, and reproduce the result for yourself. But something tells me
that you may not really be interested in such studies. Instead:

    
    
      Furthermore, it ultimately doesn't matter that much. 
      Western society has decided that we want equality between 
      men and women. If that's not happening, then we've 
      committed ourselves to make it happen. 
    

Right. Comrade, here is where I bid you adieu. If men and women have
fundamental neurological differences, which all the evidence indicates that
they do, attempting to "close the gap" in mathematically & spatially
challenging software engineering is a Sisyphean task. It is as futile as
encouraging women to make it to the NBA and out-dunk the very best men. While
there will be a Lisa Leslie or Cheryl Miller, there won't be very many of
them, and that won't be the fault of men.

Because there can be no obligation to do _that which cannot be done_.

~~~
polymatter
I try to keep an open mind, but I am finding it difficult to get past your
tone. I find people as confident and dismissive as you appear to be, are the
crackpots who are not worth my time. You don't have anything in your HN
profile either. But you also went to the trouble to provide references, so I
am confused and want to learn more.

Are you seriously suggesting its a Sisyphean task to teach women maths or
business on the basis that - on average - these have historically been male
dominated careers? If not, can you please explain further. Are you aware that
50 years ago women faced massive discrimination and that this may still be
having a lag effect today? Have you heard of stereotype threat enough to
convince someone who believes in it?

You are being condescending and rude and seem to expect your audience to share
your conviction in a fringe view of genetic determinism. Nobody is disputing
men and women are genetically different. That this change extends to
neurological changes should hardly be surprising. Different machinery require
different control structures. The scientific debate is on exactly how
significant these differences are compared to other factors that have
significant influence including the culture. I don't think the parent was even
suggesting it was 100% cultural effect either. Whereas you seem to suggest its
100% genetic, which would preclude the possibility of any woman having better
spatial abilities than any man - which I hope sounds as ridiculous to you as
it does me.

~~~
temphn

      Have you heard of stereotype threat enough to convince 
      someone who believes in it?
    

Well, stereotype threat has actually been debunked. I encourage you to read
this full pdf, including Steele and Aronson's response and
Sackett/Hardison/Cullen's reply:

[http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/ogandy/C45405%20resources/Sacke...](http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/ogandy/C45405%20resources/Sackett%20et%20al%20stereotype%20threat.pdf)

    
    
      I find people as confident and dismissive
    

This is a matter of perception. From my vantage point, people who don't know
much about genetics, neuroscience, biochemistry and the like are
extraordinarily confident in dismissing the influence of hard scientific
evidence in favor of the wishful thinking and hand-waving of much less
rigorous sociological disciplines.

    
    
      I don't think the parent was even suggesting it was 100%  
      cultural effect either. 
    

See above: jackowayed himself notes that people with an alternative opinion
are "berated". Only on the internet can the facts about genetics even be
stated without character assassination. And then, and only then, the backpedal
starts from a 100% cultural to a "50/50" position.

 _Who knows what the split is? How can we know? Gene-culture environment
interaction is so complex. And what about _epistasis_._

But "we don't know" is not the position that Sandberg takes. And of course, if
the position is actually not 100/0 then these gaps can never be fully closed
[even if this were desirable], and this resilient inequality is not the fault
of men but of Nature itself. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think
"the gap can never be closed" is a position you would subscribe to (let alone
jackowayed or Sandberg herself). So yeah, I think it's fair to characterize
the conventional wisdom as a 100% social constructionist position, which
executes a tactical rhetorical fallback when confronted with overwhelming
fact...changing not one iota in its policy prescriptions, which are still in
the main comprised of struggle sessions at places like Facebook HQ.

    
    
      Whereas you seem to suggest its 100% genetic, which would 
      preclude the possibility of any woman having better spatial 
      abilities than any man
    

You know, there's something about this topic which makes people unable to
reason statistically. Obviously there are tall women and short men. Obviously
there are Emmy Noethers. That's just not where the averages or medians are. I
mentioned Lisa Leslie and Cheryl Miller; y'all _really_ think people who know
what item-response theory is aren't intimately familiar with the concept of
overlapping Gaussians...maybe even more so than people who blanche at the very
thought of Bell Curves?

But overlap isn't equality.

~~~
edwinkite
My basic gripe with Bell-curve arguments against female genius is that at the
high end, in the exponential tail, fine-tuning is needed to explain why a non-
negligible fraction of professors at MIT (say) are women. Even a small
difference in variance would lead to overwhelming male dominance.

On the other hand, if there were no difference in the distribution of
intelligence, but cultural factors held women back, then the current "one-
tenth to one-third" fraction of women in jobs needing high intelligence is
naturally explained.

A recent PNAS paper showed that International Mathematics Olympiad teams from
countries with high gender equality contain more women.
<http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract> IMO team members are one-
in-a-hundred-thousand people - deep into the exponential tail of any Bell
curve.

A study in 1999 showed 70% of psychology professors hiring Robert, and 45%
hiring Ruth, on the basis of an identical CV. The waters of geek sexism run
deep.

Cordelia Fine wrote a good book on the evidence. PDF:
[http://hagocrat.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/delusions-of-
gen...](http://hagocrat.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/delusions-of-gender-
cordelia-fine.pdf)

It's totally anecdotal, but the young people in the canteen at JPL are about
50/50.

Notice also the political fine-tuning of the variance argument: it doesn't
dare suggest that mean female intelligence is lower (because we'd all reject
that). God of the gaps, anyone?

Getting this right matters. If you must hire very good people, and you have
the wrong model of how very good people are distributed among the population,
you will fail.

~~~
temphn

      My basic gripe with Bell-curve arguments against female   
      genius is that at the high end, in the exponential tail, 
      fine-tuning is needed
    

Well, actually no fine-tuning is needed. The Central Limit Theorem is most
valid for a sum process in the middle of the distribution. It converges most
slowly in the tails [1,2]; indeed, if your goal is to model the tails you
really are dealing with a max-phenomenon rather than a mean-phenomenon.

In this case, the underlying sum process could be a bunch of small alleles of
roughly equivalent size, each contributing to high IQ (viz. a QTL model for a
multifactorial trait [3]). In that case, if you cared about the tails rather
than the body, the discrete chunkiness of the underlying binomial distribution
becomes more crucial.

Put another way: Bell Curve arguments (aka "statistical genetics") are at the
lowest level based on discrete alleles, not perfect Gaussians. Now, those in
the field would love to get better models of the genetics of highly
intelligent people -- but to study that kind of thing you need to move to
China and work at BGI. Remember, thoughtcriminals who propose genetic
explanations for behavioral phenomena are "berated" in the US [See
jackowayed's wonderful admission against interest up thread].

    
    
      International Mathematics Olympiad.. Notice also the 
      political fine-tuning of the variance argument: it doesn't 
      dare suggest that mean female intelligence is lower 
      (because we'd all reject that). God of the gaps, anyone?
    

While we're talking about fine-tuning, why do you cherry-pick a few stats
without acknowledging that the history of science is male? Do the thousands of
male names (Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Gauss, Euler) that have inscribed their
name into history count as a datapoint here? Do the Fields Medals? The Nobel
Prizes in Physics? The faculty of math and science departments around the
world? The gender of the inventors of the locomotive, the aeroplane, and the
automobile? The names of those men who built steam engines and search engines?

I know why. All the conquests and murders in history are counted against men;
but is a little odd that every male invention is counted in the demerits
column too! I think the idea is that said ancient men ostensibly discriminated
against women, shoving them out of the way before they could figure out the
value of pi. Without said invidious discrimination women - biologically,
neurologically, hormonally, genetically different women - would have been
tearing it up on the math tip at the same rate. Just as they have been dunking
from the free throw line ever since we started the WNBA.

Bottom line: you can't have it both ways. If achievement in science and
engineering is to be a signal, if you are to cite any stats related to IMOs
and whatnot, you need to take on board the enormous imbalance in the favor of
men on historical measures of sci/eng aptitude and achievement. All due
respect to Noether, Daubechies, and Curie -- but the prior probabilities of
achievement are not equal.

    
    
      If you must hire very good people, and you have the wrong   
      model of how very good people are distributed among the 
      population, you will fail.
    

That's right. Your statement is: if you have the wrong model, you will fail.

The logically equivalent contrapositive is: if you succeed, you didn't have
the wrong model.

So given that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube succeeded with highly male
software engineering staffs, logically they _did not_ have the wrong model of
how very good people are distributed among the population.

[1] [http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/314659/central-
limit...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/314659/central-limit-
theorem-speed-of-convergence-in-center-vs-tails)

[2] <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~yuvalf/CLT.pdf> (see page 2)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_trait_locus#Multif...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_trait_locus#Multifactorial_traits_in_general)

------
dmvaldman
This is so embarrassingly bad...it starts bad, and then gets worse...
examples:

He discredits one of Sandberg's scientifically verified claims that women take
criticism worse than men, by referencing "as John Ioannidis notes, “Most
Published Research Findings are False.”

Yet he begins his review with a US News report:

"This US News article describes research that found that, among college
graduates, left-handed men earned 20 percent more than right-handed men."

Talk about a bayesian paradox here. It's easy to prove people wrong (and
right) when you believe A and ~A.

I could go on, it gets much worse. Does he really think Harvard uses the same
internet bandwidth for their particle physics dept and the dorms? Ugh...

~~~
jerrya
Philip Greenspun used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony,
metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire.

~~~
dmvaldman
ah. so being methodically retarded is all part of his plan. how clever!

------
whiddershins
Yeah, for me, this review points to a bigger picture issue. Why is the tech /
startup scene so easily lured in by establishment values?

Of course there are exceptions, Fog Creek's articles about their compensation
policy comes to mind, but very little of the egalitarian ethos that made
hacking so cool survives in the way people talk and write about working in
tech.

Corporate long-hours and ladder climbing ambition? Where every dating site [or
other product] presumes fixed gender, sexual preferences, and monogamous
behavior. Happily pouring your earnings in to high rents and overpriced 401ks,
quibbling over the .02% equity versus the extra $5k a year at the next job
while recreating the hierarchy and wage slavery which characterized the 19th
and 20th centuries. To the point where even the feminism seems regressive. And
the "art" is airbrushed illustrations and all the music is power pop.

Did I wander too far? Well it is one lens to view it through.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
As below, thanks for saying all this. I often wonder what the bloody hell
happened to the hacker-ethic and hacker-aesthetic that had drawn me towards
tech in the first place.

It's getting very close to flipping my switch for, "Burn it all down and start
over."

~~~
qu4z-2
I think the hacker ethic alive and well, and living outside the startup
scene/Hacker News.

------
salimmadjd
We all know "Lean In" is a ploy to get her into the national election psyche.
She is probably a better candidate than most of the other jokers. However, we
really can't take the book that seriously nor it's pseudo science. I listened
to a NPR event by her and was so surprised how she used stereotypes about men
to dispel stereotypes about women and no one once called her on it! It's very
simple. She now has "business" background, she is using Lean In to recruit
activist women who she needs as volunteers. Her Facebook credentials will
endear her to younger voters as well. So she will get some of independents who
might like her business background. She will get the female and youth vote. So
on paper she is a good candidate and the book is her gateway.

~~~
mr_spothawk
Sandberg Schmidt 2016. You heard it here first. They're in the middle of PR
marathon saturated with juicy election tidbits: North Korea, Facebook, etc.

~~~
salimmadjd
Sandberg wont run with another technology person. She would need a policy
person to give her credibility and help her win 1-2 states. She will get
Florida based on the Jewish vote probably. So she needs to get a VP to win
Pennsylvania and Ohio.

------
philwelch
I don't know why people are so critical of Greenspun. Maybe I'm the only one
who finds cynical curmudgeons amusing.

~~~
Vivtek
No, no! He's always a pleasure to read. But then I come from a long line of
cynical curmudgeons and this stuff always reminds me of my (now deceased)
uncles.

------
vrodic
The Last Psychiatrist also covered Sandberg as a female role model, you might
find it interesting:

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because_shes_suc.html)

~~~
girvo
That was so deliciously brutal.

~~~
salemh
TheLastPsychiatrist is an excellent and polarizing writer. Heres a punch in
the gut on Steubenville. Much like her (I think her, its a matter of debate on
gender, but mostly accepted via the comments page as "she") other posts, the
storytelling and long-form leads to meta "aha!" points.

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-
respecting_wo...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-
respecting_woman_would.html)

------
askimto
Greenplum's mean-spiritedness makes this more a review of himself than the
book, which is too bad because he manages a few golden nuggets here and there
among all the brown ones.

~~~
harichinnan
You should be evaluating data warehouse software. You got the name wrong.

------
softbuilder
Could someone explain this paragraph? I've read it several times and I don't
understand what his point is:

 _"Sandberg’s personal experience, however, contradicts this. She says that
she has never worked for a woman. All of the mentors and sponsors she
describes are men. When she was 27 years old, a man hired her to be Chief of
Staff for the United States Secretary of the Treasury. Would a woman have been
willing to hire her for the same job at age 17?"_

~~~
natrius
My rephrasing of that is, "If the working world is systematically biased
against women, was it biased against Sandberg? Why did her male bosses and
mentors choose her to be the exception? Would female bosses and mentors have
made Sandberg's success easier to achieve?"

~~~
softbuilder
Hmm. I guess I got the gist that you've expressed. That makes me feel a little
better, thanks. That last sentence was the puzzler.

~~~
jdminhbg
Here's the point of the last sentence, which I had to read a few times as
well:

When she was 27 years old, a man hired her to be Chief of Staff for the United
States Secretary of the Treasury. What, if women were in charge, she'd have
not been biased against and gotten that job when she was 17 instead?

~~~
softbuilder
AHA! Thank you. It finally clicked.

------
mountaingirl
I couldn't read this entire thread because it made me so incredibly angry. As
a woman in tech I have done plenty of reading about the genders and their
capabilities. I've read that while women tend to be stronger in English
comprehension and men tend to be stronger in Math, this is lately due to how
we are socialized, not genetic factors. I am saddened by how this thread
degenerates from reviewing Sandberg's book in a horribly irresponsible way to
discussing the incompetence of women in general. This entire thread is so
discouraging and I am disappointed there hasn't been a more rational
discussion of this book and the topics it raises.

------
fringedgentian
Seeing how quickly this entirely negative, picky-pants review got voted to the
front page of hacker news has inspired me to purchase and start reading Lean
In immediately.

It makes me think there must be something to this book.

------
wcgortel
The value of lean in is almost unrelated to anything except for it's author's
gender. Most of this stuff has been said before. There are tons of career
books, and she cites a lot of existing research.

It's valuable because it shows a career track to women in technology, which is
undoubtedly a male-dominated field. It also repackages a lot of existing
knowledge into a format that is accessible to ambitious young women.

It's valuable because it allows me to talk to my sister about how she
perceives gender issues. She is a mechanical engineer, and without having a
common language it would be difficult for me to relate my career to hers.

It's valuable because my girlfriend can pick it up and use it to develop an
understanding of how she fits in the workplace. Having a reference text allows
her to interface with peers and build a dialogue.

When I first started editing inside investing, I realized something about two
days into the job: we commonly conceive writing as the pursuit of truth
through argumentation. In many cases, that is patently wrong. Most writing
serves to stoke conversation.

All of this discussion--whether it suggests males are intrinsically different
or that there is more to women's pay and achievement gap in terms of social
dynamics--is the point of the book.

All of this criticism is valid, but guess what--did the book get you to think
about women in the workplace? Have you considered how you behave in relation
to your female colleagues and employees as a result of reading this book? If
so, it's done its job.

------
tyang
Mean but juicy.

Kudos on stirring the pot.

Sheryl's book - and the important topics it addresses - were at risk of being
a bit forgotten.

Your review could help change that.

------
jbapple
Can someone explain this to me:

> When government cannot impose right-thinking via new regulations it must be
> imposed by our social and intellectual superiors bullying us: “Everyone
> needs to get more comfortable with female leaders”

I'm having a lot of trouble finding the implication of Greenspun's summary in
the quote he uses from Sandberg's book.

~~~
Kudzu_Bob
That's because you don't know what bullying is.

------
Uncompetative
$845,000,000 salary...

Doesn't this strike anyone else as rather a lot?

------
podperson
This is an interesting piecemeal critique of Sandberg's book but doesn't seem
to look for or address any overall theme or thrust of the book. If there is no
such theme, this itself is worthy of comment.

Yes, the bolts of which the bridge is assembled are rusted, but where, if
anywhere, does it lead?

------
michaelochurch
The problem that I see has little to do with the fact that Sandberg is a
woman. It's that the Corporate System (yes, there is such a thing)
deliberately promotes people who are smart enough to run operations but don't
have what it takes (which is more of an out-of-band creativity than raw IQ) to
figure out how people and organizations really work. Then its pre-selected
leaders go on to peddle Success Crack that tells us how we can be successful,
and how it's just _so_ easy.

The title alone is enough to give me pause. "Lean In" refers to the antiquated
idea that the reason why so few women succeed in the workplace is because they
"lean back" instead of "in" during meetings. Right, because all you need to do
to wring a few more dollars out of a stingy, psychopathic billionaire
institution that would throw you out on the street if it saw profit in it, is
a little more work on your posturing. Keep an acute angle between your spine
and your pelvis and everything else will follow.

Reality: most people who are successful have no insight into how they got
there, and the system's supposed to work that way; the elevator up is made of
glass, but the people allowed into it were deliberately picked not to look
anywhere but at the digital red numbers that say what floor they are on. Of
course, most people who fail (and that's most people) have little insight
either, which is why these books sell so well.

Also, let's talk about Small Data, the realm not of normal distributions but
of Poisson distributions on discrete events. Reputations are a Small Data
problem. So are introductions, resumes, and all of the other mechanical rat-
traps that make up the career game. You can control serendipity to some
degree. If you know a disgusting secret on a Harvard MBA alumnus (which is not
that hard, because as unethical people become increasingly arrogant, they get
worse at hiding it) you can use it to get a powerful recommendation, get in to
Harvard Business School, and make influential friends. Sure, there are things
like that that you can control. Then there are things that you can't.

Filthy secret: the workplace is full of extortionist thugs, bullies, and
generally horrible people. I'd estimate that horrid people are 1-in-10 in the
general population (but you rarely see them in daily life, because there isn't
money involved) but they are 1-in-5 co-workers at the most competitive
companies, and 1-in-3 bosses. Okay. Let's just get that on the table. Unless
you have extreme luck that makes you independent in your first 5 years, you
_will_ meet horrible people who will fuck up your career, damage your
reputation, gaslight you until you embarrass yourself in a major way, steal
credit that you needed to get out of corporate hell, possibly even give you
PTSD (that's rare, but if you have the condition pre-existing, it can flare up
again). One such encounter takes you out of the running for those COO/Facebook
jobs that require a flawless career history, but you can still be modestly
successful. Two hits and you will never raise VC. You're too damaged for that.
Three and you're barely holding on to the upper-middle-class. Four, and you're
lucky to stay in the _middle_ class. Now, some people manage to get hit _zero_
times. Look up Poisson distributions if you don't believe me. It's not many of
them, but it happens. Good for them.

Why do so few women succeed in the workplace? This "they stop leaning
in!!!111" bullshit is useless, because it glosses over the real problem. It's
because bullies (including workplace bullies) prey on the people they consider
to be weakest, and those are disproportionately going to be women. It's not
that they're sexist. Not all bad people are everything bad (i.e. not all
psychopaths are sexist or racist). They're just opportunists. They hit women
disproportionately because they presume them to be weak.

You can really tell what kind of career (in a corporate context, and VC-istan
is corporate because of the king-making around funding) someone will have
based on one integer number: how many times that person has been attacked by a
workplace thug. You will never be a Sheryl Sandberg if you've dealt with a
true workplace bully, and at least 90% of people get hit at least once in the
first 10 years. Your reputation and career history are too damaged, and you
really can't "start over" because every achievement is age-graded.

It's great that some people like Sandberg are able to enjoy legitimate
careers, but the fact of never having been bullied or attacked (they might
have been laid off once or twice, but never robbed or extorted) makes them
extreme statistical anomalies. They end up with these rosy-eyed half-picture
views of the workplace, and they're able to _sell_ it in business books and
TED talks, because most of the proles _want_ to believe there's something
different out there, and that they're just missing one easy insight (i.e. just
"lean in" during meetings!)

Success Crack presents a view of the workplace that is so non-repeatable and
often self-serving as to be indistinguishable from a fantasy novel-- but with
a less inspiring setting and worse writing.

~~~
theorique
_If you know a disgusting secret on a Harvard MBA alumnus (which is not that
hard, because as unethical people become increasingly arrogant, they get worse
at hiding it) you can use it to get a powerful recommendation, get in to
Harvard Business School, and make influential friends._

[citation needed]

No doubt this is true in an abstract sense, but is there any recorded data on
this (reports of scandals, etc) or is this just speculation.

~~~
ims
Right. While not impossible (it's possible for almost anyone, no?), this type
of blackmail is probably extremely uncommon.

In the real world, it's so much more likely to be "he's a cool guy, we went to
the same prep school, why not?" Which renders the same result, but in less of
a movie-script dramatic way.

~~~
michaelochurch
_While not impossible (it's possible for almost anyone, no?), this type of
blackmail is probably extremely uncommon._

Wrong. It's extremely common, but it's also _subtle_.

It's best if the target doesn't know what you have on him. That's the beauty
of business school. You were out drinking with him 25 times and he doesn't
remember half of them, so you don't have to mention "the dirt". (Also: you
shouldn't. Explicit extortion will put you in jail.) He has no memory of
_what_ specific episodes you have on him, and there might not even be any. He
just knows that if you say, "introduce me to <Y>" or "invite me to your winter
party" that he has no choice.

~~~
jerrya
Sigh. I clearly went to the wrong business school, and I bet being married and
having a kid didn't help me either on this score. :(

(I was there in that capstone project where you had a bug in the excel
spreadsheet and we just pasted value over it!)

------
zurn
People should read (if they must) this in context of Greenspun's rather
fanatical political ideology. His blog has plenty of samples, I don't want to
link to it.

~~~
macspoofing
I've never read anything of Greenspun, other than this review. I don't know,
or particularly care, what his "fanatical political ideology" is. As far as
I'm concerned this essay is perfectly capable of being judged on its own
merits.

I am however greatly annoyed whenever someone thinks they are doing everyone
else a favour by trying to dissuade others from reading an opinion (especially
through vague ad hominem attacks). I don't think you need to protect anyone
here from uncomfortable opinions.

~~~
corin_
I'm in the same boat as you with regards not not having read anything else
he's written (I glanced at a few of his political essays this morning but
didn't read any thoroughly), so this comment is a general thought not specific
to Greenspun.

Surely every article/essay has the potential to be read differently in the
context of who wrote it. If it was on the subject of, for example,
Israel/Palestine, would you not want to know that it was a Palestinian
campaigner who wrote about their suffering, or a Zionist who wrote about their
acts of terrorism? Whether you agree or disagree with one side or the other,
context is often relevant.

~~~
macspoofing
>Whether you agree or disagree with one side or the other, context is often
relevant.

Is it really, in this case? If Greenspun was a Neo-Nazi who was serving time
for killing 12 people, would it really have changed the content of this
review?

I understand it would probably colour your perception of him, and certainly
that's what the OP was going for, but I still think that this review stands on
its own.

~~~
corin_
I haven't actually read this review, it's not something that interested me,
but I do find that (for better or for worse) I judge content on its author.
Yes, if he was a Neo-Nazi who had killed 12 people, it would make me lose
respect for his opinions.

~~~
macspoofing
Alright. Do you want to go and research Philip Greenspun before you decide
whether or not you agree with his review?

