Marissa Orr, Facebook and Google veteran, will release her debut book “Lean Out: The Truth About Women, Power, and the Workplace” on June 11, 2019 via HarperCollins Leadership (available for preorder now).
More than half a century since the equal pay act, the wage gap still hovers at 80%. Half a billion dollars are spent annually on corporate diversity programs, yet only 5% of CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women. “Lean Out” is an ambitious attempt to answer the question few dare to ask: what have we’ve gotten wrong about women at work?
Based on in-depth research and personal experiences, “Lean Out,” follows the journey of Orr, a single mom of three trying to find success in her 15-year career at the world’s top tech giants. In an eye-opening account, Orr exposes the systemic dysfunction at the heart of today’s most powerful corporations and how their pursuit to close the gender gap has come at the expense of female well-being.
“Fewer women at the top is a clear signal that the system is broken,” says Orr. “With female-dominant strengths such as empathy and consensus-building being the future of business, the headlines forecast that women will dominate the future generations of corporate leaders. But that won’t happen until we stop mistaking empathy for weakness and realize that female success shouldn’t hinge on us being more like men.”
The antithesis to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” Orr’s “Lean Out” provides a new and refreshingly candid perspective on what it’s really like for today’s corporate underdogs, while challenging modern feminist rhetoric and debunking the philosophy that suggests everyone has to be the same in order to be equal. Offering a compelling new argument for the reasons more women don’t make it to the top, “Lean Out” is not simply a retort to Sandberg’s premise, which Orr believes is based on a male worldview, but a revolutionary path forward to change the trajectory of the lives of women in the corporate world and beyond.
Featuring key chapters such as The Leadership Ambition Gap, The Confidence Gap, The Power Reward, and Well-Being vs. Winning, “Lean Out” is divided into three sections and addresses the significant need to reexamine the business world’s paradigm of a “successful leader.” Part one unravels the current “conventional wisdom” on women in the workplace, part two offers a new model of understanding for the causes of the corporate gender gap, and part three suggests a new way forward for women individually and corporate America at large.
“Right now, we are on the precipice of change,” says Orr. “And with ‘Lean Out,’ I hope to provide a fresh voice for a new generation of thinkers.”
