After Five Years of Leaning In, Everything and Nothing Has Changed

Five years ago this month, Donald Trump was planning a Miss Universe pageant in Moscow; the Weinstein Co. was riding high on three Academy Award wins for Silver Linings Playbook and Django Unchained; and Katie King was a 32-year-old attorney, all wide-eyed because she’d just read Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook Inc. Having the kind of career she wanted, King realized, was going to be a lot harder than she’d thought. “Lean In blew my mind,” she says. “Here I was, a raging feminist and a corporate lawyer for the city’s electric utility company, and I’d never asked for a raise. I couldn’t have articulated why at the time, but I just didn’t think I should. I didn’t want to be a problem.”

King worked for the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga and had long since grown accustomed to all-male meetings headed by Southern baby boomers who regarded her with befuddled amusement. But until Lean In, she didn’t know the facts: That even though women were obtaining college and graduate degrees at a higher rate than men, and even though from age 18 to 34 they were more likely to aspire to a high-paying career, they were still falling behind in the professional world. They weren’t promoted as often. The longer they stayed in the workforce, the less they were paid relative to their male colleagues. More of them were dropping out or scaling back to part time after having children instead of resuming their careers.