I think this article is very dangerous. By and large, the reason why women don't become leaders is because they don't ask to. 1) It's not a feasible social model for everyone sitting around being humble, expecting to become a leader "because they have the right personality profile for it". 2) to be effective, realistically leaders need to have a level of expertise to critically judge the project - leaving it to advisors to make the lion's share of those decisions can lead to serious derailment (which is why the MBA culture is seriously flawed).
"Lean in" may be a bit extreme, but we DO have a problem where for whatever reason women don't ASK to be leaders, and when they do they don't NEGOTIATE for more power or pay. For whatever sociocultural reason, we seem to be in the business of shielding women from the emotional risk of failure. This is deeply ingrained in our culture: although both are changing, on the centuries-old social dance floor men ask women for dances, men ask women for dates. The head of the institute where I work famously owns a Tesla Model S, and this high school intern is somewhat obsessive about the Teslas, and I told her, "go ask him for a ride around the block", and all I got were nine months of excuses not to.
To be sure, it takes a modicum of narcissism to ask for a position of leadership, just as it takes some narcissism to ask for a dance on the dance floor (I deserve to dance with this person) or ask for a date (I deserve to go on a date). Labelling narcissism in and of itself as a bad is dangerous, what is dangerous is excessive narcissism to the exclusion of humility and reason.
Anecdotally, I don't think it's hard for women to accepted as leaders. When I worked for one, it was not a problem, I seriously had a lot of respect for her. Ok. So maybe I did once think of her as "crazy" - but it was only on the day when she hyperbolically threatened to kill the grad students if they used the wrong pipette, and they sort of deserved to hear it, their performance and lack of intellectual introspection was unacceptably low. However, I do work in academic science where positions of leadership are more often than normal (but I would not say a majority of the time) earned through directly relevant achievement. In the "normal" case, it might be easier to shrug off an incompetent or perceived incompetent leader. I do sometimes wonder, though, if whether or not I and others respected her, if she wasn't still self-conscious about it.
"Lean in" may be a bit extreme, but we DO have a problem where for whatever reason women don't ASK to be leaders, and when they do they don't NEGOTIATE for more power or pay. For whatever sociocultural reason, we seem to be in the business of shielding women from the emotional risk of failure. This is deeply ingrained in our culture: although both are changing, on the centuries-old social dance floor men ask women for dances, men ask women for dates. The head of the institute where I work famously owns a Tesla Model S, and this high school intern is somewhat obsessive about the Teslas, and I told her, "go ask him for a ride around the block", and all I got were nine months of excuses not to.
To be sure, it takes a modicum of narcissism to ask for a position of leadership, just as it takes some narcissism to ask for a dance on the dance floor (I deserve to dance with this person) or ask for a date (I deserve to go on a date). Labelling narcissism in and of itself as a bad is dangerous, what is dangerous is excessive narcissism to the exclusion of humility and reason.
Anecdotally, I don't think it's hard for women to accepted as leaders. When I worked for one, it was not a problem, I seriously had a lot of respect for her. Ok. So maybe I did once think of her as "crazy" - but it was only on the day when she hyperbolically threatened to kill the grad students if they used the wrong pipette, and they sort of deserved to hear it, their performance and lack of intellectual introspection was unacceptably low. However, I do work in academic science where positions of leadership are more often than normal (but I would not say a majority of the time) earned through directly relevant achievement. In the "normal" case, it might be easier to shrug off an incompetent or perceived incompetent leader. I do sometimes wonder, though, if whether or not I and others respected her, if she wasn't still self-conscious about it.