ABSTRACT
Many of female colleagues who have served in academic leadership positions have responded to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead with a sense of defeat and emptiness despite the hopeful and energetic call to action which it trumpets. Sandberg perkily encourages her female readers to engage in the very types of attitudes and behaviors which feminism and female academic leaders have, for decades, worked to confront and combat. It is to be asserted that a similar situation exists in the academy. Sandberg may be writing in the feminine style, but her claim to Feminism, in the way that feminist scholars and activists define the word, is tenuous. Feminist theorist and activist bell hooks takes Sandberg to task for promoting, in Lean In, simplistic "faux feminism" that begins and ends with the idea that equal rights for women is based solely on gender representation in existing modes of corporate power.
