More than fifty years since the passage of the Equal Pay Act, the wage gap still hovers at 80 percent. Half a billion dollars are spent annually on corporate diversity programs, yet only 5 percent of CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women. Lean Out is an ambitious attempt to answer the question few dare to ask: What have we gotten wrong about women at work?

Based on in-depth research and personal experiences, Lean Out is inspired by the journey of Marissa Orr, a single mom of three trying to succeed in her fifteen-year career at the world’s top tech giants. In an eye-opening account, Orr exposes the systemic dysfunction at the heart of today’s most powerful corporations and how their pursuit to close the gender gap has come at the expense of female well-being. 

“Fewer women at the top is a clear signal that the system is broken,” says Orr. “With female-dominant strengths such as empathy and consensus-building being the future of business, the headlines forecast that women will dominate the future generations of corporate leaders. But that won’t happen until prescriptions for success stop requiring women to act more like men, mistaking traits such as empathy as signals of weakness.” 

Lean Out provides a new and refreshingly candid perspective on what it’s really like for today’s corporate underdogs, while challenging modern feminist rhetoric and debunking the belief that everyone has to be the same in order to be equal. Offering compelling new arguments for the reasons more women don’t make it to the top, Lean Out presents a revolutionary path forward, to change the life trajectories of women in the corporate world and beyond.