Lean Out [Paperback]

Sheryl Sandberg’s business advice book,Lean In,was heralded as a defining moment in attitudes to women in business. But for all its commercial success, it proposed a model of feminism that was individualistic and unthreatening to capital.

In her powerful debut workLean Out,acclaimed journalist Dawn Foster unpicks how the purportedly feminist message of Sandberg’s book neatly exempts patriarchy, capitalism and business from any responsibility for changing the position of women in contemporary culture. It looks at the rise of a corporate ‘1% feminism’, and at how feminism has been defanged and depoliticised at a time when women have borne the brunt of the financial crash and the gap between rich and poor is widening faster than ever.

Surveying business, media, culture and politics, Foster asks whether this ‘trickledown’ feminism offers any material gain for women collectively, or acts as mere window-dressing PR for the corporations who caused the financial crash. She concludes that ‘leaning out’ of the corporate model is a more effective way of securing change than leaning in.“Rarely does ‘essential reading’ really mean that you urgently need to read a book. But Lean Out is different: the argument that a society that promotes ‘aspiration’ must rely on outliers is just one of its many gems. There is a danger that corporate feminism will enter academia and will not be recognised for the aberration that it is.Lean Out is the antidote. Just 87 pages long, it is well worth the many hours it takes to read and absorb.”

- Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder professor of geography, University of Oxford

A very important, much-needed and well-researched book that isn’t afraid to ask the right questions and demand answers. It is a straight-talking, timely call to arms” -Independent on Sunday 

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