Can Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In take on tradwives and the manosphere?

The Wall Street Journal had a really interesting story yesterday about the current state of Lean In. There’s some news on an organizational overhaul—cuts to a quarter of the nonprofit’s staff and a new CEO (Bridget Griswold, a 25-year-old whose background is in AI).

But what caught my attention was the WSJ‘s take on where Sheryl Sandberg is taking Lean In next. What started as a movement encouraging women to pursue ambitious careers is now positioning itself as the counterpoint to the rise of tradwives and the manosphere, the Journal reports. For those who aren’t on social media, these two separate, but related, trends have grown significantly in popularity over the past year. With Trump’s return to office and DEI backlash, a certain segment of men in power have embraced a form of hyper-aggressive manhood. And it has seeped into the business world too (witness Sandberg’s former colleague Mark Zuckerberg’s much-maligned comments a year ago that companies need more “masculine energy.”) It’s a problem.

The rise of tradwives has paralleled this. These are the women glamorizing homemaking on social media—but earning big bucks doing so, making them the breadwinners for their families. Some critics say their content makes taking care of a family full-time seem like a breeze rather than the hard work it is, usually with little acknowledgment of the long-term financial and personal trade-offs. Then there’s a more general fatigue among women that corporate America is not working for them anymore, as seen in Lean In’s own data, which found late last year that fewer women are now........

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