Lean Out
Marissa Orr
If Lean In asks women to own their ambition and step forward, Lean Out asks a different question: what if the problem is not that women need to change, but that workplaces do?
Marissa Orr spent years working at companies including Google and Facebook before writing Lean Out: The Truth About Women, Power, and the Workplace. Her argument deliberately challenges some of the thinking associated with individual career advice for women. Rather than concentrating mainly on how women can become more confident, visible or successful within existing corporate systems, Orr examines the systems themselves - how organisations define success, reward particular behaviours and decide who gets ahead.
Her perspective is particularly relevant for parents. Once your time and flexibility are constrained by responsibilities outside work, workplace cultures that reward visibility, constant availability or office politics can become much harder to accommodate. Orr also questions the assumption that everyone should want the same version of professional success, making space for goals such as flexibility, meaningful work, autonomy and wellbeing alongside status and salary.
Read alongside Lean In, the two books offer two useful sides of the same conversation. There is value in asking what you can do to advocate for your career. There is equal value in recognising when the environment around you is making that unnecessarily difficult.
The Working Parenthood perspective
Not every workplace that says it supports parents makes working parenthood sustainable in practice. The polished parental-leave announcement or new-baby package matters much less than what happens when you need to leave for daycare pickup, say no to a late meeting or protect time with your family. Company policies can help, but they cannot create every boundary for you. Sometimes you have to create - and protect - those boundaries yourself.