Working in a professional kitchen or restaurant, you may be familiar with the phrase, “if you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” It is meant to keep all staff on their toes at all times. If there is a lull in customers, you clean the countertops, the tables, the salt shakers. Stay productive at all times, and use your initiative, because the health inspector could walk in at any moment. The restaurant owner’s nightmare is a surprise visit from this health inspector when the staff is standing around, proverbially smoking and joking while the kitchen is a mess.

With the 2012 release of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, and the premise that women needed to claim their place at the executive table in Corporate America, I got caught up in an awkward book club moment with women colleagues at my place of work. There is even a well documented chapter in said book about women supporting other women, but in reality, IMHO, it’s just not that simple. There are more than gender politics at play in the workplace: there’s race, ethnicity, sexual identity, and nevermind all the other stuff that we haven’t even identified or named yet.

In 2019 when the anti-thesis, Lean Out was the work of debut author Marissa Orr, I was incredibly jealous. She, a 15 year tech/business verteran like me was not only brave enough to say stuff I wasn’t, but she was also, somehow, a divorced mother of three. Huh?

My friend (AP) had already put me up to writing a similar tome, back in 2017, when I announced to her that I’d discovered I was a bonafide workaholic one Sunday as we sipped champagne in Dolores Park , saying “CY: you should write the anti-thesis to the Sandberg book!”

When my mother recently gave Lean Out a once over – she said – and I quote, “this girl is so bitter and angry! No one is going to listen to her message.”

It’s definitely not fair to compare Sheryl’s 4.2 million copies sold, to Marissa’s uh-, how-many? (why not?) But, I suppose that is what I am doing. I guess my mother was was right about no one listening to Marissa, or maybe it depends on your perspective.

Whether or not I am leaning in, leaning out, leaning instead of cleaning, or leaning with meaning, I am definitely doing it on the shoulders (backs?) of the women who’ve come before me, and so I bow (lean!) toward you, all y’all who identify as women, with respect, grace, and gratitude. It just so happens I live right on the Memorial Trail of Rosie The Riveter (museum and monument) at Kaiser Shipyard #2, so those trail blazers are in my mind each morning when I walk the dog. That’s another story, for another day.