Shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2017

Sheryl Sandberg’s business advice book, Lean In, was heralded as a defining moment in attitudes to women in business. But for all its commercial success, it proposed a model of feminism that was individualistic and unthreatening to capital.

In her powerful debut work Lean Out, acclaimed journalist Dawn Foster unpicks how the purportedly feminist message of Sandberg’s book neatly exempts patriarchy, capitalism and business from any responsibility for changing the position of women in contemporary culture. It looks at the rise of a corporate “1% feminism”, and at how feminism has been defanged and depoliticised at a time when women have borne the brunt of the financial crash and the gap between rich and poor is widening faster than ever.

Surveying business, media, culture and politics, Foster asks whether this “trickledown” feminism offers any material gain for women collectively, or acts as mere window-dressing PR for the corporations who caused the financial crash. She concludes that “leaning out” of the corporate model is a more effective way of securing change than leaning in.

Praise for Lean Out:

“A welcome call to arms” — Times Literary Supplement

“Rarely does essential reading really mean that you urgently need to read a book. But Lean Out is different” — Danny Dorling, Times Higher Education

“Fascinating, thought-provoking and at times outrage-inducing” — Ariane Sherine, Huffington Post