lean in

It is a different version of Sandberg I meet today from the one I met here a year ago, when Lean In, her polemic about female leadership, had just been released.

Sandberg, meanwhile, has been on what she would almost certainly call a steep learning curve, encountering hostility from a quarter she clearly didn't anticipate before the book came out - not conservative men in the business world, but other feminists, many of whom have resented her ahistorical and largely apolitical approach to the subject and Lean In's occasionally infuriating guilelessness; its general air of having hit upon this travesty called inequality in the work place.

She would rather talk about initiatives such as the Lean In circles, which she has been travelling the world promoting for the last year.

It's the tone, unsurprisingly, that also motors Lean In, which is full of chipper exhortations to roll up your sleeves and get on with it.

They also encouraged her to marry early, on the basis that, as she writes in the new introduction to Lean In, all the "good ones" get snatched up in college.

Maybe." The new graduate edition of Lean In is designed to call a generation to awareness.

What it was, in fact, was a clever piece of marketing to frame a central issue of Lean In: the stigmatisation and trivialisation of female leadership.

She has tried to expand her book to include chapters from women of colour, and "women who don't want children, and different family structures and stuff", and refers critics to the Lean In website, where women across a much broader spectrum - female soldiers in Afghanistan, those on low and middle incomes - are posting accounts of their own experiences.

Much of the criticism on this score strikes me as redundant; getting more women into the boardroom is a legitimate exercise, besides which, many of the lessons from Lean In are translatable, particularly those on negotiating.

When Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was at Harvard College in the late 1980s, she admits in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, she didn't call herself a feminist, nor did any of her friends, because "we mistakenly thought there was nothing left to fight for." At school and in the workforce, Sandberg writes, "I believed it was just a matter of time until my generation took our fair share of the leadership roles." She went on to Harvard Business School, which in Ginsburg's day had admitted no women at all, and where women are still only 40 percent of the students.

"More and more often, I was the only woman in the room." She adds, "We have ceased making real progress at the top of any industry." In her new book, Sandberg urges women to "lean in," or be more assertive on behalf of their careers, and she gives some advice on how to do it.

(Both appear often, and uncontroversially, in Lean In.) The spheres these men came from and came to lead were also Sandberg's, and understanding their milieu helps us see the limits of her vision--but also how far out on a limb she has already ventured.

(A woman, Drew Gilpin Faust, succeeded him.) Sandberg defended Summers, arguing that while he had perhaps "communicated poorly--and even insensitively," he had a track record of advocating policies benefiting women and had been "a supportive and deeply caring mentor for me and many other women." In Lean In's chapter on mentoring, she talks about how it is not a one-sided transaction; the mentee also gives back, and Sandberg did.

For all of Sandberg's social fluidity, she is taking a risk with Lean In. As she writes in the book, "Within traditional institutions, success has often been contingent upon a woman not speaking out but fitting in." Calling out sexism counts as not fitting in.