(From Forbes)—Jodi Kantor’s recent article in the New York Times about Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook‘s COO,  and her forthcoming book, “Lean In” certainly created a great deal of attention; as of this writing, it is the most emailed article of the day and generated over 600 comments. Disappointing, however, is the fact that although Kantor acknowledges that Sandberg addresses the systemic issues that create barriers to the advancement of women, she oversimplifies the very complicated issues related to gender equity.

Kantor posits the question of how to level the playing field for women as an argument between those who belong to one of two warring factions—either the “fix the women” school of thought or the “fix the system” believers. As someone who has worked on these issues for years, I can tell you that change requires both effort from both individual women as well as strong commitment from those who lead organizations.

Even more a sin than oversimplifying the problem is replicating the problem. Kantor directly plays into one of the negative stereotypes about women in the workplace—that they can’t get along.  Her use of counterpoints including the so-called “feminist row” with Slaughter as well as the cite to Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s HBR blog post critiquing Sandberg’s talk at Davos positions the issue as personal rather than philosophical. That doesn’t help.

What does help is being clear that women are entitled to have differing views of how to solve the problem. Deciding to start with offering advice to individual women does not preempt efforts to solve what we and others (see Susan Sturm, 2001, “Second Generation Employment Discrimination: A Structural Approach.”) have labeled second generation gender issues. These are the powerful yet often unexamined barriers that arise from either cultural beliefs (stereotypes) about gender or workplace practices and policies that inadvertently favor men.

For example, jobs are gendered—they are either “pink” or “blue” depending on whether they’ve traditionally held by women or by men. “Blue jobs” include fireman, lawyer and banker and among “pink” jobs are nurse, teacher and secretary. When a woman takes a “blue” job, questions are often raised (but usually not spoken aloud) about her suitability for the role. The result is that her performance may be evaluated more stringently than a similarly situated male colleague’s would be.

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