May Cheng was seven years old when her parents split up. Her mother, a House of Commons interpreter, continued working while raising Cheng and her two siblings with the help of a live-in nanny. “She was doing everything as a single parent and making it look easy,” says Cheng. Years later, after the kids left the nest, her mother downsized to a small apartment. “We realized she had to do that to get out of debt,” says Cheng, now an intellectual property partner at Fasken Martineau. “She had to make some lifestyle adjustments to pay back the burden of what she had allowed us to maintain when we were growing up.”
Stories like these didn’t make it into Facebook titan Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In. In fact, she wrote that women need supportive husbands to take care of the home and the kids, which affords them the option to “lean in” at work.
“She was writing from the perspective of somebody who’s never really had a real challenge in her life,” says Cheng, who remembers her own mother turning down a promotion, and her father consistently failing to make child support payments.
And now, it seems, Sandberg has done some soul-searching. Two years after the book was published, her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly while on vacation in Mexico. On Mother’s Day, she posted a lengthy apology on Facebook in which she admits she never knew the hardships of a single mother until she suddenly became one.
“It’s nice for her to come forward and acknowledge that failing,” says Cheng. “Whether it’s heartfelt or not, I think it rings true.” But, she argues, the book might have also failed to address another key issue — how we measure success at all.
“It’s really written for professional women,” says Cheng. “A lot of it presumes that you are in a professional position, that there’s room for advancement and that you should go after the promotions.
“The underlying premise of the book that’s a little bit faulty is that everybody wants that corner office. Not everybody does, and that shouldn’t define whether you’re successful or not.”
Photo courtesy of Drew Altizer, for the Financial Times.