10 Things Sheryl Sandberg Needs to Do to Actually Beat the Tradwife Movement
Corporate feminism has entered the chat
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The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Sheryl Sandberg’s nonprofit Lean In has shed a quarter of it’s staff and brought in a 25-year-old CEO named Bridget Griswold to relaunch the organization as a counter to tradwife culture and the manosphere.
In a March interview with People magazine, Sandberg called tradwife content “sexist” and “very detrimental to women.” (which…sure!) The plan is to use technology (AI?) to produce faster, more “of-the-moment” research, help women succeed in the workplace, continuing the annual Women in the Workplace study and the Lean In Circles.
Sheryl is the standard-bearer for a certain type of corporate ‘girl boss’ feminism that reached its zenith in the 2010’s. Like many highly successful corporate women I speak to, I imagine Sheryl is shocked that today’s young women do not think the exact same way as she does. And that her version of feminism, which relied on individual solutions and not the systemic work to help moms succeed, has left the door open for right-wing efforts to subjugate women.
Lean In’s data has found that corporate America is not working for women anymore – there’s a general fatigue, and fewer women are now aiming to be promoted at work.
I’ve been sounding the alarm about the right wing’s newest version of the war on women for many years on Instagram. And I’ve written 32 (!) Substacks talking about the issue, warning that the left isn’t taking the right’s influencer machine and tradwife message seriously enough. I’ve given presentations to major left-wing donors and orgs, urging them to take on this issue head-on and repeatedly warned that we are destined to repeat the mistakes we made with young men in 2024 with young women in 2028 unless we act swiftly and significantly.
I’ve also spent years studying the specific tactics, the funding pipelines, the aesthetics, and the political architecture behind how the right is influencing women online.
This is not a lifestyle trend; it is the newest battle in the war on feminism that has been underway for 50+ years. I want Lean In (and their vast donor base!) to help us win this fight, so here’s the expert advice I would give Sheryl and Bridget (and all the other feminist groups who want to take on this issue!) on what they actually need to do:
1. Stop pretending Lean In didn’t contribute to the problem.
I think I’ll start with my most confrontational take: the tradwife movement did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in part in response to a decade in which women were told, by Lean In and by the broader cultural establishment, that fulfillment would be found in maximizing professional ambition.
Speaking as a millennial woman, we tried it, we climbed, we stayed late and negotiated and raised our hands. And then we dealt with recessions and layoffs, looked around and realized we were managing careers and still doing a lot of the invisible labor and the mental load and the emotional caregiving, in a country with no paid family leave and unaffordable childcare.
We weren’t failing because we hadn’t leaned hard enough. We were failing because the system hadn’t changed, and “lean in” was not asking it to. In 2016, after her husband’s tragic death, Sheryl wrote a Facebook post acknowledging the failures and limitations of her philosophy. She wrote about the lack of access to paid maternity leave and the difficulties of being a single mom who can’t lean in or lean out.
But she didn’t do the work to create a cultural moment around those ideas, as she did with Lean In.
Our generation has also been faced with generational and gender crises, hitting us at every turn. Boomers are staying in the workforce longer, holding onto their houses and preventing younger workers from rising through the ranks. And whilst so much time was spent empowering women to succeed everywhere from the soccer field to the boardroom, not enough time was spent teaching them that they weren’t entitled to a world free of us.
Conservative writer Bethany Mandel published a piece after Sandberg’s announcement called “Sheryl Sandberg Is Still Wrong.” (no link because I don’t want to drive clicks.) Evie Magazine published one titled “I lived the Feminist Dream. I Want my Money Back.” Both play on the notion that Feminism is selling the lie that if you pursue a career, it will bring you happiness.
But that is not feminism, that is capitalism. And by giftwrapping her own ideals in the language of feminism, Sheryl was giving the right a massive gift that they are cashing in today.
The tradwife movement doesn’t position itself as anti-feminist the way Phyllis Schlafly did, it positions itself as the corrective to a feminist lie. And that lie, as they tell it, is that a career will make you happy. (again, that’s not feminism, but it’s nonetheless a belief people hold)
Sandberg cannot lead a credible counter-movement with the same narrative she had before, merely dressed up in AI and fancy press releases.
2. Understand the pipeline before you try to counter it.
One of the most infuriating things about watching progressive institutions respond to conservative influencer culture is how shallow the analysis always is. They see the sourdough and linen aprons, call it “sexist” and move on. They think ‘data and facts’ can counter it and never ask how a woman actually gets there.
The tradwife pipeline is engineered with entry points, escalation mechanisms, and a destination. Wired described Evie Magazine as “an inherently political vehicle that serves as a pipeline to bring young women into the alt-right.” Evie doesn’t start with politics; it starts with skincare, relationship advice, celebrity gossip and then takes you to articles asking whether hormonal birth control is actually good for your body.
By the time you’re reading a piece about why men prefer women who aren’t on the pill, you’ve been walked so gradually into the ideology that you don’t notice the turn.
Tradwife influencers don’t start by telling you to quit your job, they start by telling you they were burned out and are now madly in love with their lives, and lovers and chickens. The conservatism comes after the culture war and more saliently, once the viewer has hundreds of small parasocial moments with influencers they trust as friends, which is a much stronger relationship than with institutions.
The map already exists. Researchers have built it, journalists have reported it, and women with large platforms have been documenting it in real time for years. (I have written about it in over 30 posts, if anyone at Lean In wants a starting point.) Lean In does not need a multi-year research initiative to understand what is happening. The information is out there. The urgency is now.
And then they need to face the harder structural truth: a culture war being run by influencers cannot be won by an institution.
Lean In can issue all the reports it wants or get Sandberg on every magazine cover in America but none of that reaches the woman who trusts Alex Clark more than she trusts any organization, because Alex Clark shows up in her phone every day feeling like a friend. Institutions don’t do that. They can’t. Which means Lean In’s job isn’t to out-institution the right. It’s to build something that operates on an entirely different model.
3. Reframe the fight.
The message Sandberg is currently running, that tradwives are sexist and very detrimental to women, is a losing one. Not because it’s wrong, but because calling something “sexist” is not a persuasion strategy. In an environment where the tradwife movement has spent years positioning itself as the only side that actually respects women’s choices, the word doesn’t land as a critique. It lands as an attack on women who are finding comfort in this content.
Every time Lean In leads with “this is sexist,” it is handing the tradwife movement proof that feminism is the scold, the finger-wagger, the institution that only respects women’s choices when they make the ‘right’ ones. Contrary to what you would think, the tradwife pipeline is built on the language of the pro-choice position, built on the brand promise that they are not telling women what to do. So when feminism responds by calling people’s lifestyle choices sexist, it plays directly into the story that has already been written.
The winning argument is fundamentally different, and Lean In needs to adopt it precisely. We are not telling women what to choose - we are fighting to make sure the choice is real.
For decades, the dominant corporate feminist message has been about access to opportunity, getting more women in leadership, more women at the table, more women climbing the ladder. That was progress, but progress is not the same thing as autonomy. (of course, this is not the message of all feminism, or even what I would argue is the message of any feminism ... however, you can’t unring a bell. This is the narrative a lot of people believe.)
You can have a career and still not have your time be your own, because childcare and household labor don’t get redistributed just because women enter the workforce. You can vote and still watch politicians strip your rights, be told you are equal and still carry most of the caregiving and emotional labor on top of a full-time job. Lean In got women into rooms. It did not change who controls what happens in those rooms.
The tradwife movement looked at women who had leaned in and saw that the promise hadn’t been fully delivered. They are offering young women a solution that seems simpler and more effective, and one that doesn’t require any structural fixes at all. The aesthetics are beautiful precisely because the life they are selling looks like rest, (it’s not!! We all know this is a lie!) and women are exhausted enough to want rest badly enough to accept a version of it that costs them everything.
Many others and I have written about a recent study that showed one-third of young men think women should return to ‘traditional’ (not my term) gender norms. A recent survey by The Argument found that only 18% of Americans agreed that women are taking jobs that should go to men, and 48% of people under 30 strongly disagreed with returning to traditional gender roles, ie: that there is not a significant support in this country for a calcification of anti-feminist gender norms.
I think this is important for two reasons:
1) Polling has limitations, and my general thesis is that opinions are strongly held until they change. What we see with online persuasion is that it is an exceptionally effective tool to make people believe things swiftly - and we shouldn’t underestimate the changing tides of public opinion.
2) Fundamentally, the women being reached by this content are not being targeted because they are ideologically committed to stripping their own rights. It’s not a politics-first movement. They want femininity (and motherhood) to feel good and natural, which is a desire feminism can meet. They want belonging and beauty and happiness and rest ... which are not inherently conservative. The pipeline does not work because the endpoint is popular but because the entry points are, and because the left has not built an alternative path from those same entry points to somewhere better.
There is a meaningful difference between a woman who stays home because she genuinely wants to - because she has financial independence and legal protections and the real ability to leave if she needs to - and a woman who stays home because childcare costs more than her salary, because her employer has never made work livable, because it’s the agreement she had to make to find the only available romantic partner, or because the legal system has been quietly rebuilt to make financial dependence permanent. The first woman is exercising real autonomy. The second is making the only available option and being told it is a free choice.
Real autonomy requires real conditions, and Lean In needs to convince women that we are working towards a world in which they can actually make those choices - otherwise they will opt out because they perceive that as the best available option.
It requires:
fair pay,
accessible/affordable childcare,
legal protections and access to financial independence,
a healthcare system that does not make reproductive care a privilege of geography and economic status
&available partners who understand they must carry half of the mental and emotional load.
The tradwife movement validates women’s real frustrations and problems - and people LOVE THIS.
Lean In told women to put their heads down and hustle. The modern workplace is exhausting and, frankly, still feels largely designed for someone with a wife at home handling everything else.
The tradwife movement acknowledges all of that and then tells women to make themselves smaller and call it freedom.
Real security doesn’t come from giving up power, it comes from building it. That means connecting the linen apron aesthetic to what the same organizations promoting it are doing to paid leave legislation, reproductive rights, and no-fault divorce law, because the lifestyle and the policy are the same project.
But the structural argument is not enough on its own, because the tradwife movement doesn’t win on argument. It wins on aspiration. It sells a life that looks beautiful, restful, and purposeful, and women are drawn to it not because they don’t want freedom but because they have stopped believing freedom is actually available to them. For more on this, see my article:
Lean In has to address that gap directly. The life autonomy feminism is fighting for is not the joyless corporate grind the right has spent years caricaturing. It is a life where you are not dependent on anyone’s goodwill to survive, where the overwhelm gets addressed structurally instead of absorbed personally, where freedom and security and joy are not things you trade against each other but things you build together. Make women believe that life is real and attainable, and that the fight to get there will happen in their lifetime.
4. MAHA is part of the tradwife pipeline.
In progressive circles, we want all of the pipelines to MAGA to be distinctly recognizable on an org chart. But the internet, like life, is messy, and MAHA and the tradwife narratives are part of the same pipeline. MAHA is a funnel into today’s anti-feminist conservative movement, and the MAHA women are reachable. Not all of them, but a significant number are not ideological conservatives. They are women who are genuinely worried about their kids’ health, genuinely suspicious of institutions that have failed them, and genuinely looking for community and answers. They are currently finding their answers in the wrong place, but the underlying concern about being let down by modern systems is real.
The overlap between MAHA influencers and the broader conservative influencer ecosystem is substantial and deliberate. Alex Clark blends content about natural health and homesteading with explicit anti-feminist messaging. Evie Magazine packages itself as a wellness and lifestyle publication for young women while running pieces that oppose birth control and argue that feminism has made women miserable. The wellness aesthetic is the entry point. The politics follow.
The reachable MAHA woman has real grievances with institutions that are also real feminist grievances:
She does not trust pharmaceutical companies, an industry with a documented history of concealing risks and prioritizing profit.
She does not trust the food system, and worries about her kid’s health.
She feels let down by a medical establishment that has historically dismissed women’s pain and concerns.
The right found her at the intersection of all those legitimate grievances and handed her a political identity that was pre-built and waiting.
The correct response is to show up and validate those same grievances with something real. Feminist critiques of pharmaceutical companies, of food industry lobbying, of a medical system that has historically undertreated and disbelieved women, are legitimate and powerful, and the left has largely ceded that territory to the right out of fear of being associated with anti-science messaging.
The wellness and homesteading space became right-wing because the right invested in it and the left stepped back. Lean In won’t be the group to fund and promote influencers who talk about wellness and natural health from a feminist frame. But they need to realize that the tradwife movement doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s part of a sophisticated online ecosystem that reaches women exactly where they are and pulls them into a rabbit hole of anti-feminist propaganda.
Sheryl Sandberg carries a LOT of weight in the donor class; she has access to people with technological expertise far above that of most anyone else in the feminist movement. I know many people reading this may be sympathetic with the idea of just saying, “fuck corporate feminism!” but the reality is - to combat the well-resourced and technologically advanced anti-feminist war coming from the right, we need a sophisticated machine. Sheryl and her ilk are necessary allies (nay, leaders!) in this fight and we very much NEED them to step up and deliver a long-term strategy that will work.
5. Build a media ecosystem not just reports.
I have written about this at length, and I am not going to repeat myself here, but the left needs to stop treating social media as a place to post press releases and start treating it as a persuasion ecosystem, which the right has spent fifteen years and hundreds of millions of dollars building.
Lean In specifically has a problem that goes beyond the broader left’s social media failures, which is that Sheryl Sandberg is one person, one very, very wealthy, very out-of-touch woman with some allegations hanging in the balance. She can give interviews and post on LinkedIn and hold events and release reports that get coverage in The New York Times. None of that is a media ecosystem. It is one woman with one platform talking into a conversation that is already saturated with parasocial voices on the other side.
Lean In has access to resources, to technology, and to a network of professional women who understand exactly how digital media works and who can play in the sandbox of the internet. The question is whether Sandberg is willing to use those resources to actually build something that influences and persuades, or whether she is planning to release some reports.
I rage against the tyranny of reports in the movement!!
I get it – they get picked up by The Washington Post and The Atlantic, read by the people who donate money and attend your dinner parties. You can use them to seed talking points into the ecosystem if produced in a timeline manner (that rarely happens) - but they are not message distribution systems and they are certainly not action. The women who are three months into a MAHA rabbit hole are not reading The Washington Post. They are watching YouTube and listening to podcasts and getting served content by an algorithm that is very good at its job, and none of that content is from Lean In.
Getting mainstream media coverage of a Lean In report is a messaging strategy for people who are already persuaded. (There is a difference between persuasion and preaching to the converted, and the left keeps confusing the two as if the problem is that people haven’t heard the argument yet rather than that the argument is not reaching them.)
What actually works is what the right did - yu identify women with charisma, and you give them the production support to compete in today’s information environment, you arm them with talking points that persuade in the culture war. You build cross-platform distribution so that a podcast episode becomes a YouTube video becomes Instagram clips becomes a TikTok becomes a newsletter. You invest in the algorithm through paid promotion and SEO, you build community infrastructure so that women who find this content have somewhere to land, and you think in years, not news cycles.
If Lean In’s strategy is to hold events and run programs for women who are already in Lean In circles, it is putting a finger in a cracking dike while the water pours through a hundred other places. The women who need to be reached are being reached by the other side, on the platforms they already use, by voices they already trust, with a message that has had years to settle into the culture. The only answer is not a better report. It is a machine built to compete inside the very machine Sheryl Sandberg built. (YOU LITERALLY RAN FACEBOOK, YOU KNOW THIS SHERYL!)
6. Don’t make Lean In the center of everything you build.
One of the biggest structural problems with how progressive institutions approach communications is that everything they do is, at its core, donor development. The press releases exist to impress funders. The research reports justify the budget. The content gets made for people already in the room, to make them feel good about the room they’re already in.
If Lean In wants to build a persuasion infrastructure that actually works, it has to be willing to fund things that don’t have Lean In’s name on them and are not part of their institutional brand.
This is genuinely hard for organizations to do because it means giving up credit. It means money going out with no press release attached. It means building things whose success cannot be put in a donor report. Do it anyway. The goal is not a Lean In brand expansion; the goal is to change the world women are living in - those are different projects.
7. Play in the dirt.
The left has a purity problem. It is deep, it is structural, and it is losing us this fight.
Progressive communications are built around an instinct to vet every message, clear it through every coalition, run it by legal, and sanitize anything that might generate blowback. The result is content so neutered it has no efficacy online. Nobody shares it because nobody is moved by it. Meanwhile the right runs Facebook campaigns with fake grassroots energy and real targeting data. They run paid UGC campaigns where wellness influencers with no declared political affiliation reach enormous audiences with messaging that has been quietly engineered to move them.
Lean In has access to capital and technology. They could be running targeted Facebook and Instagram campaigns built with greater sophistication than any serious political ad buy. They could be doing narrative seeding campaigns that get specific frames into the bloodstream of online conversation before they become explicit political messaging. They could be funding paid UGC campaigns that partner with mid-tier wellness and lifestyle influencers that build sustained astroturfed campaigns.
All of it is exactly what the right does every day, and frankly the moral high ground is not a strategy when women’s lives and rights are on the line.
8. Build a counter-aesthetic.
The tradwife aesthetic is extraordinarily powerful. Golden light, linen aprons, pastoral abundance, slow living, the deliberate quiet of a home that exists outside the grind. It makes you feel something that gets lost in the doomscroll, and feeling is the mechanism by which political persuasion actually works.
Lean In’s current aesthetic is a woman in a blazer at a whiteboard. It is giving PDF. These are not things that move people emotionally. They make people feel like they are at work, which is exactly what everyone is trying to escape.
The counter-aesthetic is not “ambitious career woman.”
The counter-image is women who control their own money, their own time, and their own choices. Women with real friendships that sustain them through actual hard things, who have the financial independence to leave a bad relationship because they can pay their own rent, who took the trip and negotiated the raise. Women who are living full, textured, self-determined lives, and who look like they are genuinely having a good time doing it.
That life exists, and women like me are living it, we have lots of examples online and in celebrity culture who glorify it every day. Lean In needs to amplify that story as beautifully and specifically as Ballerina Farm tells Hannah Neeleman’s. (That is a genuinely high bar. Hannah Neeleman is extraordinary at this.)
9. Expose the money. Name the machine.
The tradwife movement is not a spontaneous cultural phenomenon. It is a funded political project, and the funding comes from people with a specific legislative agenda that has nothing to do with women’s happiness and everything to do with women’s compliance.
Evie Magazine‘s period tracking app was backed in part by Peter Thiel, a man who has spent years funding pronatalist policy and anti-democratic political projects. Turning Point USA’s women’s programming is bankrolled by conservative megadonors who also fund efforts to restrict abortion access and roll back no-fault divorce.
Corporate feminism has the resources to investigate funding schemes further and the capacity to do the communications work to make that picture coherent to the public.
When a woman watches an Alex Clark video, she is having a parasocial experience with someone she perceives as a friend sharing her genuine opinions, it would be good if people understood that Clark’s media career exists because she is part of a political project. To do more reporting as I did a few weeks ago on the secret right-wing birth control campaign so that people can see it’s not organic, it’s astroturf. I’m not saying fact-checking changes the experience for the individual consumers, but it is a necessary step to compete against the massive machine Wizard of Oz they’ve created.
10. Fight for structural change and make women hope their dream life is possible.
This is the one that matters most, and look – it’s not up to Lean In to do this – but it’s sorta the whole potato. (the whole pie? The whole shebang?)
Lean In built its identity around individual empowerment: negotiate more, demand more, take the seat at the table. In 2026, with women watching their rights get stripped in real time while being sold the tradwife fantasy as liberation, asking them to optimize their personal behavior is not just insufficient; it is insulting.
The tradwife movement wins because it offers a solution, however false and ultimately disempowering, to a real structural problem. We live in a country that does not support mothers, does not fund families, does not protect working women, and has spent the last several years actively making all of this worse. You cannot counter a solution, even a fake one, with “try harder.”
As I wrote in my article last week, Andrea Dworkin argued that right-wing women are making a bargain because they see the dangers of a patriarchal world with clear eyes and make what they consider a rational calculation.
In exchange for submission, compliance and the performance of femininity, they receive the promise of protection, economic security and social respectability.
We need a much louder and more sophisticated messaging infrastructure to fight for the structural changes that would actually reduce the burnout, making the tradwife fantasy so appealing: universal paid family leave, affordable childcare, flexible work policies with real teeth, equal pay enforcement, reproductive healthcare access and more. These are not radical demands; they are the baseline of what every other wealthy country has figured out and they are the things feminists and democrats have been fighting for. They are also the exact things the political forces behind tradwife culture are working to eliminate.
However, we haven’t invested the time and money into making sure people KNOW this is what we are fighting for and persuading them to believe it’s possible. We aren’t speaking to people outside OUR echo chambers, the people who are persuadable or just looking for answers in places that we don’t show up.
The message has to be: we see what is happening to you, we know the system is broken, and we are not asking you to lean into it anymore. We are fighting to fix it.
The antidote to “stay home and you’ll be happy” is not “lean in harder.” It is: you deserve better than what either of us has offered you so far, and here is what we are actually going to build. That is an argument that can win.
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“We are not telling women what to choose - we are fighting to make sure the choice is real.” 🤯‼️👏 can I get this on a t-shirt??
I know Emily did her big one when I have to click "View entire message" from my inbox.
Five star. Confronting the Lean In problems are exactly how I feel as a millennial wife in leadership at work. Sherly, be so for real, I don't want to wear a blazer and spend time at work in a conference room with other women saying let's do more. I am doing enough. Trust me. I don't need advice on how to succeed at work, but I do need to feel like my choices are my own.