The TechCrunch ‘Lean In’ Roundtable, Part 4: Are We Our Own Worst Enemies?

Welcome back for the last segment of our roundtable discussion of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new best-selling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

In part one, posted Tuesday, we discussed the controversy surrounding Lean In as well as the element of fear and how it plays into women’s career paths. In part two, posted Wednesday, we discussed the emotion of guilt and the myth that women can “do it all.” And in part three posted yesterday, we talked about Sandberg’s advice on finding real mentors and partners who will support your professional and personal ambitions.

We concluded the series with the discussion embedded above, about how women can be our own worst enemies when supporting each other in the workplace. Sandberg writes in the last chapter of the book,

“It is the painful truth that one of the obstacles to more women gaining power has sometimes been women already in power.”

Our roundtable consists of a small group of Generation Y female leaders that represent the Silicon Valley tech industry’s rising new guard: Leah Busque, the former IBM engineer who is now the founder and CEO of TaskRabbit, the startup that has built a platform for outsourcing errands, tasks, and deliveries; Ashley Mayer, the senior director of communications for cloud-based enterprise storage technology firm Box; Megan Quinn, the Google and Square alum who last year made the leap into the venture capital world as a partner at Kleiner Perkins; and Pooja Sankar, the Stanford MBA and former Facebook engineer who is now the founder and CEO of educational Q&A platform Piazza.

In this last segment, we also asked our panelists for their impressions on the book, and the larger movement it is meant to spark — across the board, everyone found Lean In to be easy to read and informative. Busque is actually buying the book for each of her employees (both women and men) at TaskRabbit, and a couple of our other panelists are thinking about following suit.

Tune in above for more! And make sure to check back on Sunday, when we’ll post the full video from the roundtable, along with a written transcript.