Courtesy of Archana Gilravi
By Lauren Giella
Senior Reporter
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Building the pipeline for women to ascend into leadership starts early. When former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote her book, "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead" in 2013, she started a movement to help women reach their full potential in the corporate world and promote equality. A decade later, Sandberg's Lean In organization launched a program to specifically target young women at a stage of life when negative gender stereotypes start to take hold and impact the goals and self-esteem of girls.
Archana Gilravi is the senior vice president of Lean In Girls, overseeing a leadership program that empowers girls aged 11 to 15 to build confidence, reject limiting stereotypes and become leaders in their communities. The program focuses on a four-part curriculum that teaches girls to recognize their strengths and build leadership skills, challenge stereotypes by reframing failure and setting healthy goals, overcome biases and both internal and external barriers to success and become an ally to call out unfair treatment and actively create a better, more equitable world.
She sat down with Newsweek to talk about leadership and how to set young girls on the path to success.
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This story comprises two interviews, edited for space and clarity.
How have you navigated your career, from consulting to programming at Lean In?
After undergrad, I did consulting. I've always liked business and what drew me to consulting was the ability to experience a lot of industries in a short period of time. I don't think I realized how foundational consulting skills were going to be to my career, like communications and writing and all of that. During business school, a CEO came and did a presentation and he was talking about the importance of getting people management experience as early as humanly possible after business school [because] it's the one thing you cannot learn in the classroom.
So when I was looking for a job afterwards, I was looking in tech. I grew up in Silicon Valley and I've always been a fan of Google. This is a product that I love and I had also heard that Google put post-MBAs students into people management roles early. I spent eight years at Google, and that was a pretty formative time in my career. I had a really good director who also ended up becoming a sponsor for me throughout my career.
And then after eight years, I wanted to be more senior at a smaller organization to understand how decisions are being made at a more senior level. I joined a mid-sized, late-stage startup and that was not a great experience, but I still learned a lot. It is where I probably learned how to fail and still push through and also where I really recognized my passion for women's leadership. I really saw the differences and how men and women were being treated, so I really focused a lot of my energies on mentoring women. I was doing a podcast on women's leadership, and that was really fun. And then the Lean In opportunity came up and I was like, 'Oh, I can't go in a nonprofit space, that's just that for me.' And that's when I called [my mentor] and [he] said, 'it will be such an interesting opportunity for you to just have different exposure and to work on this thing that you're so clearly passionate about.'
What are the most important lessons you teach young girls to set them up for success at Lean In Girls?
We have a four-part framework [at Lean In Girls]. We start with redefining leadership; A lot of girls still think that leadership is command and control. They still think that it's only something adults can do. And so we start with a redefinition. We talk about values, strengths and we talk about leadership as something that you can do today. It can be as simple as sitting next to the new girl at school [or] helping somebody with their homework. We really open the aperture for what it means to be a leader. And that is so powerful because then girls have that language and that confidence.
We then have an entire section around fear of failure, risk-taking and perfectionism. Girls are two times more likely than boys to exhibit perfectionism, they don't like to take risks [and] they're really scared of failing. And it really inhibits them.
What I would say is our Lean In secret sauce is we take all the research that we know around gender bias and what women face in the workplace, around stereotypes, and we talk about it in a very age-appropriate way. In middle school, girls are old enough to understand society's expectations of women. They're trying to fit in, they're trying to people please, so when they encounter a stereotype, they often will think it is their fault. And so when we teach girls these are the gender stereotypes that exist [and] here's how they show up in the world, what happens is that when they encounter it in society, they no longer internalize it.
And then we end with this section on active allyship. And that is really important because we do see that mean girl behavior spikes in middle school. Originally, it wasn't even part of my pitch because I was like, ‘oh, since I went to middle school, clearly this has been fixed,’ and it has not been. There are two things that we see happen: By going through the program, girls are building relationships with each other that go beyond their friend group and we talk about active ways to advocate for each other. We get feedback that girls are doing much more advocating of others if they see somebody else in trouble, and that's kind of the ethos of the program.
What are some of the biggest challenges you find girls face today? In many ways, being a kid is universal. But some of the problems kids are facing today are very different from what you or I faced in middle school. What are those unique challenges of being a kid in 2025?
The stat that always gets me is that two-thirds of girls worry that speaking their mind will make them unlikable, and that is up from 46 percent in 2017. So I think that that's always existed, [but] the data suggests that it's getting worse.
You've got the mean girl and the bullying. You've got the confidence gap, which has been extensively researched; I have a spunky seven-year-old and I am terrified when she turns eleven, I'm just gonna watch you wilt [like] a flower – that hopefully will not happen. I don't know that those challenges have changed; I think they've always been there.
I don't think we have the right interventions in place to be able to change that. Because there's actually a lot of interventions in K-5, like Girls on the Run [and] Girl Scouts. And then there's high school programs, including debate, that help with girls' confidence. I think that there's a gap in middle school and that was the gap that we were hoping to help solve.
I’m curious, recently, we’ve all heard a lot about the male loneliness epidemic and how boys are falling behind girls in school. And those are valid concerns, but I fear those conversations often circle back to somehow being girls’ fault or that girls are doing too much. Have you encountered those concerns? And if so, how are you dealing with that?
It's a really good question. I think that you're right that the dynamic is fascinating when you read [that] schools aren't built for boys, girls are getting ahead. What's fascinating is that I do think girls are doing better academically. But boys' confidence [is] still as high as ever. So all of the challenges that we are solving for boys don't actually face those same challenges. They face different challenges that need different solutions. There's many respectful organizations that are addressing the problem for boys and that is wonderful and we should support them, but don't also put the onus on me for also solving the boys' problem.
Lean In and McKinsey recently released their 2025 Women in the Workplace report, which compares the experiences of professional women and men. The report found that only half of the companies are prioritizing women's career advancement and women were less likely than men to say they want to be promoted. What was your biggest takeaway from that report?
Listen, this year's report was really hard to read. It's really painful to see companies not prioritizing women's advancement, because I think that will have a real effect. I believe that bias is inherent in the system, so if you don't put programs in place to help counter that bias, we will start to lose ground. And I think we will see that next year. The other piece that was really hard to read was this is the first time that we've seen a notable gap between the differences in ambition between men and, as an ambitious woman, that's also really hard to read. But that gap goes away when managers provide the same level of support to men as women.
What I would still say to women earlier in their career, because we see one of the bigger gaps is for early career women, is you can't let it get you down. You have to retake control over the plan. If there was a plan in place for an awesome leadership development program and that no longer exists, go find one. You don't have a mentor at work or the sponsorship program is not available? Go create a Lean In circle and make your own mentors and make your own sponsors.
I see men take charge of their careers all the time. Do I think men have the wheels greased for them a little bit? Absolutely. But men who are serious about their careers are very thoughtful and put plans in place. And so what I'm telling women is to do the same.
How does it impact how Lean In Girls creates the pipeline for girls to leadership?
There are two stats that really drive me from the Lean In Girls standpoint. The first is that 66 percent of girls worry that speaking their mind will make them unlikable, and that 60 percent of high school girls do not think that they are smart enough for their dream job. And so what happens in middle school is that if you're worried about saying what's on your mind and you're worried that you're not smart enough, you drop out of advanced coursework, you don't take on leadership roles, you change what your ambitions are. So that's what I want to fix. I actually think the pipeline will take care of itself if you inspire girls to just be who they are and act in ways that are authentic to them. I think what happens is that they shift the goalpost, they're scared to take risks, they're scared to fail [because] they think they're not allowed to fail. And when you don't take risks, and if you don't fail, you will never actually get to that next level.
And that's why I believe in our program. Do I think it'll impact the pipeline? Absolutely. We are fundamentally trying to raise a generation of girls to speak their minds, to not be scared, to not have society's influence to make them smaller. I fundamentally believe this next generation of women is doing what they want, but in a way that is much more true to who they are. I don't think girls are inherently less confident [than boys], I think they become less confident when you internalize society time and time again [and] this beats you down.
How important are mentors in fostering the success of girls and women in the workplace?
I think the role of mentors and sponsors is huge, and there's a lot of research that suggests that that is the case. I was lucky to have a very good manager [who] cared about my growth and development, and that helped open doors and new opportunities for me. I wasn't doing a good job, I was definitely in over my head. I was leading this global team, half of my team was older than me, they were all men and it was an intimidating situation. But he didn't like take me out of the role. He kept me in and allowed me to kind of sail through, which I very deeply appreciate.
We don't [have a mentorship program at Lean in Girls] right now, but I really want to. We have this incredible global community of volunteers, we call them our network leaders, and they do really cool work on bringing women together across different industries for talks and networking events and community-based events. In a future world, I would love to connect girls who go through our Lean In Girls program with those women to come for career talks.
What does good leadership look like to you? And how has that evolved over your career?
I had a lot of bad examples of leadership when I first entered the workforce and much more of the command and control, hierarchical, ‘do what I say’ versions of that. And I really had to untrain that to think about it to be much more expansive and much more kind and forgiving. And my favorite thing that actually I feel like really shifted it was a Brené Brown podcast that was around the fundamental belief that people are doing the best that they can. Because if you don't believe that, you're just so cynical and then you just think people are shirking responsibility. And by and large, that is not true.
And so if you go in with an approach where you're like, ‘okay, this person may not be meeting my expectations, but if I genuinely believe that they are doing the best that they can, then my approach is different.’ My approach goes from being more punitive, to much more understanding [about] what training do they need? What support do they need? How can I support them? How do I sit down with them? To believe that everybody has the capacity to learn, to grow and to evolve, which I fundamentally believe. And so that shift has really changed my leadership style.
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