Does ‘leaning in’ work in practice?

“It’s hard. It’s really hard. I don’t believe too much in leaning in.”

It was the end of a work day and night was coming on. Christie Nicholson sat in a dim Brooklyn office, its exposed brick lit only by desk lamps.

“There is no leaning in. The concept is meant to be positive but I feel like the reality is that this is hard. And you don’t do it as well — whether the mothering part or the job part,” she said. “You suffer through it … you’re tired.”

Nicholson is the cofounder of Publet, a web-based publishing product she believes will basically replace the PDF. The problem with PDFs, she says, are that they’re difficult for Google to crawl, so they die online soon after they’re born. They’re also hard to share from: you can’t just highlight an interesting part of text and tweet it out with a link. They’re annoying.

Furthermore, they’re expensive to compose and design. This becomes a particular problem for companies that spend thousands of dollars on formatting and InDesign for marketing content and white papers. Then on top of that, you don’t get good analytics on who’s reading, or who’s reading what part, or for how long.

Publet fixes all those problems. And Nicholson is invigorated when talking about it.

It’s in beta now, and has been used by some large corporations and publishers already. And yet, the discussion kept coming back to children and life (a theme).

The Publet back-end. (Courtesy image)

“It’s long hours and lots of Slack messages,” Nicholson said. “Lots of emails and lots of pricing sheets. You make it work but it’s a marathon.

“Being a mom,” she stopped herself. “I have a very supportive husband and he takes on half of it but there’s so much attachment to the mom from the child. I have my startup job and then I have [my two-year-old daughter] and basically that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I move from one job to the other job. My cofounder [M.J. Coren] does work 16-hour days and you need someone like that on the team. Someone who’s perseverant enough and can work 16 hours a day, week after week, and can hear, ‘No,’ and shake it off and keep persevering. But it can be hard, because I can’t.”

You're working in the Valley culture with 26-year-old men who don’t get it. It’s impossible for them to get it. I didn’t get it!

There’s also the issue of competition. Competition can be such an enormous contributor to anxiety, and as Nicholson said, so much of it is only in your own head.

New York is known as a fast-paced place, particularly in the work world, but Nicholson finds herself working as much in the Silicon Valley tech culture, which is populated in large part by young, driven, unwed, men. She and her cofounder were accepted into the prestigious accelerator AngelPad last year. Nicholson is 45, and believes she’s the only mother to have gone through AngelPad.

“I do feel slighted,” she said. “I do it to myself, even. I was always one of those students who was there earliest and stayed latest. At AngelPad I’d arrive at 9 a.m. but all the guys had been there since 8 or 7:30. It was really hard to accept that, but you have to. [You’re] working in the Valley culture with 26-year-old men who don’t get it. It’s impossible for them to get it. I didn’t get it! [There are] things that you don’t even know are going to be things. You think of diapers and lack of sleep but you don’t think it’s going to take 20 minutes to get a coat on a two-year old and walk out the door.”.”

But this isn’t meant to be an article about complaining, or even about the workload of having a startup.

Nicholson had a pretty simple message, which is that it’s OK for women to feel like they can’t do it all. And that it’s OK to not do it all. Or to do it all but to do it in stages. That leaning in is possible, but maybe not preferable for everyone (a statement with which the philosophy’s author, Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg, would likely agree).

(Nicholson later emailed an essay she thought really got it right on the issue, How Our Engineering Environments are Killing Diversity: Introduction, by Kate Heddleston.)

“There’s this old tired idea of purpose in your life,” she said. “Having these very difficult, challenging things that give such joy, they give such purpose to your life. Watching another human grow up? There’s nothing better. And to feel so much for them, to have that purpose for them is something I really feel everyone should have. Both accomplishments, the daughter and the startup, give you great joy. They’re two of the most joyful and horrible things you could do in your life, and I did both of them at the same time. I would advise people to do one or the other.”

Nicholson, who’d been talking rapidly, stopped for a minute. Then it was back to business.

“Basically, I think Publet could be the No. 1 way to read and digest ebooks and marketing and sales papers across the board,” she said. “It’s dead simple. Writers will be able to edit and write better than on WordPress.”

She continued: “What I’m intrigued by, what struck us, is how many people are still spending tens of thousands of dollars to design these PDFs. To go where? To be stuck at the bottom of a website?”

Where’s the purpose in that?