Cyberfeminists had banked on women being able to use new technologies to achieve their own ends, but capitalism has delivered a tech industry that uses them instead. Nor does it use us gently. The women who contributed to Lean Out write with palpable dismay that the latter-day capital of technological innovation has become a sort of sexist hellscape—even though any enterprising female geek must, of necessity, be drawn to Silicon Valley like a moth to a Zippo Lighter app.

To read the rest of the review, visit Bookforum.

To view the full list, visit Inc..

Shevinsky admits to being “a compulsive writer” who scribbles notes continuously, but the fully formed essays she contributes to “Lean Out” required drastic measures. “I had to lock myself away. I booked a hotel room. I slept, wrote, didn’t talk to anyone. It’s a solitary thing.”

But her debut book is exactly the opposite of solitary. “I did a big people search. The world needed this book. It isn’t ‘the Elissa book.’ We really want to hear unheard stories. I felt even well-intentioned journalists were putting their story in my story. We needed women’s stories to be unedited. I respect their voices.”

The voices are as varied as the visible light’s color spectrum. Twilio software engineer Dom DeGuzman’s perspective and can-do “rock climbing” steps to success are calm and encouraging; Google engineer Erica Joy writes poignantly and vulnerably of “losing herself” as a woman of color for the sake of being included with co-workers whose behavior ranged from covert discrimination (pay inequities) to blatant sexist and racist behavior; Lesbians Who Tech founder Leanne Pittsford boldly reflects a recurring theme that instead of building complaint lists or deepening their voices at the corporate board table, women (and men) in tech must be architects of actual infrastructures that support diversity.

To read the rest of the review, visit San Jose Mercury News.

Lean Out is clearly a response to Sheryl Sandberg’s wildly successful book Lean In, which convinced a small army of women to step up, “lean in” to their workplaces, and demand more responsibility and more respect. Shevinsky and the authors of the essays in this book take a different angle: If tech companies are unwelcoming places, to hell with them. Start your own company and run it better.

Read the full review in Venturebeat.

Shevinsky’s cutting compilation of essays doesn’t specifically ask why tech is so congenitally sexist. Sexism in Silicon Valley is an observable, quantifiable reality. More daringly, Lean Out questions whether the tech industry even deserves women at all. When highly criticized tomes like Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead tout the importance of proactively turning yourself into a workplace commodity, Lean Out comes as a welcome counter-manifesto, with fangs. The problem isn’t necessarily that women don’t care about programming, or that women in tech aren’t measuring up to their male peers. According to Lean Out contributors, they do, and they are. The problem is that some cocktail of internalized misogyny and financially-reinforced tokenism runs through the veins of tech.

To read the rest of the review, visit Broadly.

“It’s hard for all new founders, and women face their own set of challenges. When I first became a CEO, I was still very unproven. It was hard for me to find good collaborators,” she said. “My advice to young women getting into startups is to just level up as fast as you can. Find a way to become an expert, and to get yourself noticed. Find mentors that you can trust.” Another way to advance women in tech is to have “more women investors and more women entrepreneurs,” she added. “That’s how you get women in the boardroom.”

To read the rest of the article, visit Bustle.

I often say it’s hard to speak up against injustice when you’re on your own, but with other women behind you, you feel like you can do anything. This book brings a gift to those who read it; Lean Out immediately provides 19 siblings to women feeling isolated and struggling to find their place in tech culture.

To read the rest of the review, visit Leena van Deventer’s blog.

In 1977, when I was 23 and working to create a career as a folksinger, I occasionally ran into middle-aged, British male folksingers whose music I admired who told me I was pushy to approach people for work, and that when I was good enough people would let me know by offering me bookings. The question of how they would know was never addressed. I didn’t think they were sexist, just out of touch and with poor business sense, maybe because 20 years earlier that approach actually worked for them.

These guys were a tiny minority and they had no control over my career. Now imagine that you’re in a business where almost everyone around you is like that and they’re your co-workers, managers, bosses, and they can control your life. That is the experience recounted by the many authors of Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture. They work — or, sometimes, worked — in start-ups and major companies, in venture capital firms and research labs, mostly in Silicon Valley.

To read the rest of the review, visit ZDNet.

I spent some time this week reading Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture, a collection of essays, articles, and blog postings written by 25 women in, as you might guess, the technology field. Their collective experiences make depressing reading despite the courage, humor, and thoughtfulness with which they approach their various situations. Here we are in 2015, nearly 50 years since feminism became a mainstream movement, and, as the book’s editor, Elissa Shevinsky, writes, many women are departing the technology industry because they find the conditions too hostile.

To read the rest of the review, visit Wendy Grossman’s blog.

Elissa Shevinsky speaks about her life, work, and Lean Out in Williams Magazine:

As she made her way in her career, she says she responded to “the dominance of white male nerd culture” in tech constructively: by founding her own startups. That way, she says, “You create your own culture, and you create your own path. I love my companies, because I hire everyone who’s there. If someone is out of line, I can fire them.”

Calling herself a “serial entrepreneur,” she worked in product development for several startups and co-founded an online dating site called MakeOut Labs before joining Glimpse, an app for disappearing text messaging.

She also published her first book in June, an anthology called Lean Out (OR Books). With a nod to Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, Shevinsky calls her book an exposé on the reality of the tech industry for women.

“I can speak from my own experience: I have dropped out of more than one company because bigots were not going to let work get done,” she says. “Women are leaving tech, and it’s clear that intolerance is a real factor.”

To read the rest of the profile, visit Williams Magazine.

Let’s stop blaming women for the failure of big tech companies and VCs to appreciate, respect, hire, fund and promote them. And let’s stop trying to solve an urgent, time-sensitive HR problem—the need for big companies to create genuinely hospitable environments for a diverse set of employees—with unrelated measures like teaching kindergarteners how to code or feel-good conferences that don’t change how women are hired, promoted, funded or respected. Women are not the problem. Let’s fix the thing that is.

To read the full excerpt, visit Metro.

“I’m now of the opinion that pervasive bro-ness is enough of a distraction to be worth dismantling,” Shevinsky tweeted, joining a chorus of outrage over the TechCrunch scandal. She elaborated on her rekindled feminism in a follow-up blog for Business Insider titled, “That’s it—I’m finished defending sexism in tech.” “I thought that we didn’t need more women in tech,” she wrote in the impassioned manifesto that elevated her to the role of social justice warrior. “I was wrong.”

Yet in her new book Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Startup Culture, Shevinsky says her initial response was flawed. Recruiting more women is not the answer, she writes, because women are not the problem. “The solution is to respect the professional environment,” says 36-year-old Shevinsky, an acclaimed designer of female-centric dating apps and cybersecurity software. “Simply having more women in the room doesn’t fix that. We need to fix the root issues in tech, to overhaul the entire culture. Women are smart to not show up to an industry that doesn’t welcome them.”

To read the rest of the review, visit Metro.

“I got hit on all the time. I was trying to talk business and they were trying to date me. I’ve gotten very good at navigating, but women shouldn’t have to.”

By all accounts, Shevinsky said she’s been lucky. She’s used to being one of the guys and says for the most part, her experience in tech has been positive. But she became particularly aware of sexism in tech while working on her new book, Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-up Culture.

It’s a compilation of first-person essays by women and transgender people in tech that portray a broad range of experiences in the industry. It includes everything from stories of sexual harassment by prominent VCs, to what it’s like to be a person of color at Google, to a transgender person’s account of being both a man and a woman in the tech world.

Shevinsky said working on the book inspired her to be more transparent about her own life.

To read the rest of the review, visit CNN.

“Ultimately, I think the problem with Reddit, with Facebook, with Google, with so many of these social and data-oriented companies is that they were designed by men. So you have products designed for men, by men, for a corporate world built and run by men.”

To watch the rest of the interview, visit Huffpost Live.

The biggest takeaway of this collection is a direct contradiction of the Sandberg principle: it asks women to ‘lean out’ and be true to themselves instead of trying to ‘lean in’ or fit into a system designed and controlled by men. This could mean speaking out rather than keeping mum, seeking confrontation rather than avoiding one, and striking out on your own rather than trying to be one of the boys.

To read the rest of the review, visit The Hindu.

HuffPost Live spoke to Elissa Shevinsky about her forthcoming collection, Lean Out.Joining Shevinsky to speak about hurdles women face in tech were Zerlina Maxwell, Amanda Marcotte, and Poornima Vijayashanker.

To view the segment, visit HuffPost Live.

To listen to the rest of the podcast, visit Venture Beat