Rachel is a rising junior interning at the National Domestic Workers Alliance this summer.

When I was younger, I read constantly and my mother used to joke that I was one of the few children she knew who had to be told to be put a book down. This love for literature has lasted through the years; though I rarely have time to read for pleasure at Duke, the first thing I do upon arriving home for vacation is make a trip to the local library. One of my selections for this summer was Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, which tells the story of a journalist’s attempt to see what it would be like to survive on $6 or $7 an hour. Of all of Ehrenreich’s jobs, it was during her stint as a house cleaner that she felt the most invisible and cast out of society.

While some of Ehrenreich’s middle- and upper-class clients are retired or have one partner stay at home, many of the women for whom she works hold steady jobs. Largely wealthy and white, they are the type of women towards whom Sheryl Sandberg directs Lean In when she focuses on strategies for female workplace success without addressing race, socioeconomic status, or a host of other factors that influence women’s workplace experience. Reading these two books back to back, I couldn’t help but notice the stark differences between the lives that Sandberg and Ehrenreich described – while Sandberg suggested that working women hire private domestic help, Ehrenreich was that help – and had to work a second job just to pay her rent.

Sandberg encourages solidarity among women, but that solidarity does not seem to extend beyond the corporate sphere to the domestic workers that she and her colleagues employ. If “leaning in” as defined by Sandberg often involves hiring domestic help, does it involve rendering human beings invisible? If this country and the world need more women in positions of leadership, does that merit other women earning less than living wage so top female executives can devote time to climbing the corporate ladder instead of cleaning their homes? National Domestic Workers Alliance, a non-profit where I will be interning, advocates for millions of domestic workers like Ehrenreich’s colleagues who struggle to buy food and pay the rent – often in the service of families and women who have chosen to “lean in.”

How do we reconcile these two needs – one for increased female leadership in the corporate sphere, which may require domestic help, and one for increased rights for domestic workers? Domestic help provides crucial jobs to men and women across the nation, but I shudder at the idea of an experience as dehumanizing as the one that Ehrenreich describes. There must be a way to create a humane and sustainable experience for the people who work to clean or maintain others’ homes, but often struggle to pay the rent on their own. As men and women move forward in corporate careers, they all too often forget the humanity of those who do the tasks they can now afford to outsource. This summer, I look forward to working with an organization that serves to remind the nation of that humanity – along with the rights, needs, and desires that come with it.