Described as having “something approaching rock-star status” in her field, Joan C. Williams has played a central role in reshaping the debate on women’s advancement for the past quarter-century. Williams was awarded the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award (2012), the ABA’s Margaret Brent Award for Women Lawyers of Achievement (2006), and an Outstanding Book Award for Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It (2000).
Her most recent book, co-authored with her daughter, What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Every Woman Should Know draws on interviews with 127 women at the top of their fields—an all-star list that includes Fortune 500 execs, entrepreneurs, and rainmakers at the world’s biggest law firms—to identify patterns of gender bias in the workplace. The result is a researched-based “how-to” manual for mastering office politics as a woman.
For Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating this groundbreaking work by taking a peek at some recent writings about the book—and tackling issues of gender bias at work in general—from around the web.
Here are three of our favorite passages.
From “What works for (non-rich, non-white) women at work,” xoJane:
We have not come a long way, baby. Williams and Dempsey write that as of 2011, only 3.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were women — 2 women of color, 16 white women, 17 men of color and 465 white men (“that’s one table of women in a room packed with 27 tables of men”). To cope, women can use the savvy outlined in What Works for Women…, which notes that the answer is not for women to hear more advice about why they don’t negotiate, but for organizations to start leveling the playing field for women so they’re not stigmatized for negotiating in the same ways that men do. Women should also remember to network and practice self-care — to do what we can, and no more. I took that advice when I left newspapers to start working for myself two years ago.
From “Outing Gender Bias,” strategy+business:
In their book, What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know (NYU Press, 2014), the authors explain that the “prove it again!” pattern requires women to demonstrate their competence repeatedly, far more often than men, because “information about men’s competence has more staying power than equivalent information about women.”
The authors use a 2007 FedEx ad to illustrate the “stolen idea” phenomena. Yes, the ad features men, but Williams and Dempsey report that 68 percent of the “67 women…roughly 40 to 60 years of age and at the top of their fields” interviewed for their book have experienced the same phenomena.
From “How Women Can Get Ahead at Work: A New Manual,” Forbes:
It’s a good thing that the authors have a sense of humor. Otherwise the book’s meticulous accounting of the many, often subtle forms of sexism in the workplace would be hard to take. But ultimately the tone of this book is quite hopeful. Despite its lengthy discussion of a tug of war between women in the workplace, it carries a unifying message with its blurb from Sheryl Sandberg and the book’s introduction by Princeton professor and former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter, who wrote a controversial Atlantic magazine article about how it is sometimes impossible for women to balance high-powered careers with the demands of motherhood. Though she and Sandberg have been portrayed as opponents in the discussion over women’s roles in the workplace, they unite in their support for this book’s message: If we make ourselves and the men in our lives aware of the roadblocks women still face, and we use some of the many tools the authors offer in this volume, we are likely to see women move ahead more quickly. In fact I wish there were a way to interest men in reading this book. They would get the most out of it.
