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The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies
Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter
The United States has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world. Despite what is often reported, new mothers don’t “opt out” of work. They are pushed out by discriminating and inflexible workplaces. Today’s workplaces continue to idealize the worker who has someone other than parents caring for their children. Conventional wisdom attributes women’s decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. In this thought-provoking book, Joan Williams shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men―both those who seek to avoid the breadwinner role and those who embrace it―as well as women. Faced with masculine norms that define the workplace, women must play the tomboy or the femme. Both paths result in a gender bias that is exacerbated when the two groups end up pitted against each other. And although work-family issues long have been seen strictly through a gender lens, we ignore class at our peril. The dysfunctional relationship between the professional-managerial class and the white working class must be addressed before real reform can take root. Contesting the idea that women need to negotiate better within the family, and redefining the notion of success in the workplace, Williams reinvigorates the work-family debate and offers the first steps to making life manageable for all American families.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2010
5 people are currently reading
267 people want to read
About the author
Joan C. Williams
26 books82 followersProfessor Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law, 1066 Foundation Chair, founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and Co-Director of the Project on Attorney Retention (PAR).
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 19, 2019
读完全书写评论的时候我才意识题目副标题有关男性。全书是根本上是对女权主义和性别平等进而促进社会进步进路的反思和补充，觉得女权主义不应只关注女性，同时应当重塑男子气概等概念；社会不应当只关注底层，也应当关注被忽视的中层。
January 30, 2017
This book should be mandatory reading for any liberal still struggling to understand what happened on November 8, 2016. Great guidance - and a needed dose of humility - for those struggling to understand the "white working class".
And finally, an exquisitely written and incisive treatise that takes on the elephant in America's room: masculinity. This election cycle saw some discussion of "toxic masculinity", mostly in the context of sexual assault. And that discussion is important, but misses the broader point: masculinity is also about defining the social and professional norms that govern American behavior... of everyone. Not just the creeps who embody toxic masculinity.
This book, written in 2010, is far better than Lean In, though admittedly I wish the font were a bit bigger (am I getting old?) It feels denser and academic, even though it reads quickly and is interspersed with anecdotes to drive home the broader theoretical points. The whole thing is worth reading, but a couple sections in particular are brilliant. "Masculine norms at work" rebuts the commonly held assumption that the home is the locus of masculine/feminine dynamics, and persuasively argues that men are equally bound by rigid and damaging gender norms.
The two sections on class "The class culture gap" and "Culture wars as class conflict" speak precisely to the phenomenon of elite scorn and working class resentment that gave us Donald Trump. And Williams does a great job of broadening her analysis to include people of color and the LGBT community, a welcome intentionality that enriches the feminist analysis.
Williams is a gift. She is the sharpest thinker in the country right now on this particular set of issues (the relationship between masculinity, class, and politics). Now if she could only do a Ted Talk or something so her wisdom doesn't languish on the shelf.
A few choice quotes:
"Masculinity holds the key to understanding why the gender revolution has stalled."
"The question is not whether physical, social, and psychological differences between men and women exist. It is why these particular differences become salient in a particular context and then are used to create and justify women's continuing economic disadvantage."
"The good news is that men can be quite happy with family caregiving, as long as they feel their masculinity is secure. The bad news is that many non-elite men do feel their masculinity threatened, by jobs that are insecure of are (they feel) beneath their dignity."
And finally, an exquisitely written and incisive treatise that takes on the elephant in America's room: masculinity. This election cycle saw some discussion of "toxic masculinity", mostly in the context of sexual assault. And that discussion is important, but misses the broader point: masculinity is also about defining the social and professional norms that govern American behavior... of everyone. Not just the creeps who embody toxic masculinity.
This book, written in 2010, is far better than Lean In, though admittedly I wish the font were a bit bigger (am I getting old?) It feels denser and academic, even though it reads quickly and is interspersed with anecdotes to drive home the broader theoretical points. The whole thing is worth reading, but a couple sections in particular are brilliant. "Masculine norms at work" rebuts the commonly held assumption that the home is the locus of masculine/feminine dynamics, and persuasively argues that men are equally bound by rigid and damaging gender norms.
The two sections on class "The class culture gap" and "Culture wars as class conflict" speak precisely to the phenomenon of elite scorn and working class resentment that gave us Donald Trump. And Williams does a great job of broadening her analysis to include people of color and the LGBT community, a welcome intentionality that enriches the feminist analysis.
Williams is a gift. She is the sharpest thinker in the country right now on this particular set of issues (the relationship between masculinity, class, and politics). Now if she could only do a Ted Talk or something so her wisdom doesn't languish on the shelf.
A few choice quotes:
"Masculinity holds the key to understanding why the gender revolution has stalled."
"The question is not whether physical, social, and psychological differences between men and women exist. It is why these particular differences become salient in a particular context and then are used to create and justify women's continuing economic disadvantage."
"The good news is that men can be quite happy with family caregiving, as long as they feel their masculinity is secure. The bad news is that many non-elite men do feel their masculinity threatened, by jobs that are insecure of are (they feel) beneath their dignity."
March 28, 2020
Another fantastic book. It opened my eyes to even more factors that must be considered in any solution to the Big Problems faced by parents in navigating work and family care and everything wrapped up within them.
This book is too far-reaching for me to be able to do it justice, so the below is going to be what stuck out most to me--mostly in the form of blocks of text pulled directly from the book.
1. The narrative of women opting out of the workforce (pull factor) as opposed to be pushed out is over documented and analyzed in the news despite being the province of upper middle class women. Many many more women are explicitly pushed out yet the narrative is one of women's choice, concealing the true systemic problems faced by working class parents. "Virtually no opt-out articles highlight the role of public policy in creating the often-unappealing choices available to American women. That needs to change. A good place to start is with in-depth coverage of the five basic elements for work-family reconciliation: short-term leaves; good, affordable child care; regulation of work hours; universal health coverage; and a tax system that does not penalize dual-earner families...Other than the US, the only countries in the world that lack paid parental leave are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland."
2. The chapter aptly titled "One Sick Child Away from Being Fired" was sobering. "Workers need to know that just because an employer gives them a job, this does not mean their employers can deprive them of their ability to do right by their families."
3A. Most workplaces are still designed around masculine norms. A good illumination of what that means: "Physicists, the quote reminds us, are expected to be not only assertive but also single-minded. This is a singularly polite way of saying that, to be a physicist, you need a stay-at-home wife who allows you single-minded 'devotion to work' unencumbered with family responsibilities....Masculinity holds the key to understanding why the gender revolution has stalled. As long as men continue to feel threatened by the possibility of being perceived as wimps and wusses unless they live up to the norms of conventional masculinity, we can expect little economic progress for women."
3B. "When ideal-worker norms police men into breadwinner roles, this not only hurts women. It also hurts many men who cannot live up to the breadwinner ideal. Since most American families cannot live comfortably on one income, many low-wage and working-class men, as well as many middle-class men, find themselves in the painfully demoralizing position of being unable to 'support their families.' Men are caught between an old-fashioned breadwinner ideal and an economic era that no longer delivers the family wage and are left facing two choices: they can feel terrible about themselves or they can help to change an outdated ideal. Feminists need to engage men on this issue."
4. "The business case for a more family-friendly workplace has been documented extensively for decades. Yet this evidence has had relatively little impact because stereotypes and unspoken norms either cause people to overlook the business case or to refuse to credit it. For example, the Project for Attorney Retention (which I [the author]) direct, documented over a decade ago that law firms that fail to offer non-stigmatized flexible schedules experience high rates of attrition, which creates steep costs. It costs between $200,000 and $500,000 to replace a single associate-so five associates who leave to escape 24/7 schedules cost a firm $1 to $2.5 million. Yet many law firm partners remain convinced that 'we can't afford part-timers.' Attrition costs are seen as unavoidable costs of doing business and so fade easily from consciousness. Yet every penny associated with part-time schedules is noticed, and deeply felt, because it is seen as an 'extra,' avoidable cost."
5. "Because caregiving is not high-status--whereas having a wife who takes care of all that is--many men are reluctant to admit at work that they have caregiving responsibilities."
6. "Placing masculinity at the center of a feminist analysis is not the same as placing men there. Instead it involves recognizing that workplace gender bias against women stems from masculine norms in jobs that historically were held by men. These masculine norms not only create the maternal wall, the glass ceiling, and gender wars--they also create hydraulic pressures on men to perform as ideal workers to the extent their health and social advantage allow them to do so."
7. "By the mid-1970s, feminists had divided into those who believed that women should be treated the same as men ('sameness feminists') and those who believed that women were, in fact, different from men and that courts and legislatures should recognize and act on that fact ('difference feminists')."
8. Much of the rest of the book was a HUGE discussion of those different strains of feminism and how they also worked together with assimilation feminism vs. reconstruction feminism. Basically, assimilation feminism sought to get us to the point that if a woman could act like a man and get the same results, we've gotten equality. Reconstructive feminism on the other hand, "picks up that what women need is equality-but that equality first required changing masculine norms to allow women, as well as men, to have both conventional careers and a conventional family life."
9. Another interesting section was the analysis of the book Women Don't Ask. The book asserted (or at least was interpreted to assert) that women basically only have themselves to blame for income inequality with men because they negotiate and ask for raises so much less often. This turned out to be an overly simplistic explanation based on some recent social psychological studies:
"The first experiment investigated whether subjects were willing to hire candidates who initiated a salary negotiation. The results showed that both male and female evaluators penalized female candidates who initiated salary negotiations more often than men who did so. The second experiment measured subjects' willingness to work with women who negotiated salary. The results: women, but not men, incurred a large penalty for attempting negotiations--women's penalty was 5.5 times as steep as men's--and women as well as men were less willing to work with other women who initiated salary negotiations. The third experiment involved a video of the candidate's interview rather than a resume. In that experiment, male evaluators (but not females) penalized women for salary negotiations, and they insisted on a greater degree of likeability from women job candidates than from men. The final experiment manipulated the ex of the interviewer. The results showed that when the evaluator was male, women were more reluctant than men to negotiate compensation, but this difference did not exist when the evaluator was a women.
"The researchers posed the question of whether women's greater reluctance 'to initiate negotiations over...compensation could be explained by the differential treatment of male and female negotiators' and concluded 'the answer is yes.'
10. The last part of the book I can't even begin to analyze sufficiently. It examines the class culture gap, hidden class conflicts (that Americans are loath to admit exist), and how these gaps and conflicts have kept us from making real progress in the large work-family reconciliation problems we have in the US.
I will be thinking about this book for a long time.
This book is too far-reaching for me to be able to do it justice, so the below is going to be what stuck out most to me--mostly in the form of blocks of text pulled directly from the book.
1. The narrative of women opting out of the workforce (pull factor) as opposed to be pushed out is over documented and analyzed in the news despite being the province of upper middle class women. Many many more women are explicitly pushed out yet the narrative is one of women's choice, concealing the true systemic problems faced by working class parents. "Virtually no opt-out articles highlight the role of public policy in creating the often-unappealing choices available to American women. That needs to change. A good place to start is with in-depth coverage of the five basic elements for work-family reconciliation: short-term leaves; good, affordable child care; regulation of work hours; universal health coverage; and a tax system that does not penalize dual-earner families...Other than the US, the only countries in the world that lack paid parental leave are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland."
2. The chapter aptly titled "One Sick Child Away from Being Fired" was sobering. "Workers need to know that just because an employer gives them a job, this does not mean their employers can deprive them of their ability to do right by their families."
3A. Most workplaces are still designed around masculine norms. A good illumination of what that means: "Physicists, the quote reminds us, are expected to be not only assertive but also single-minded. This is a singularly polite way of saying that, to be a physicist, you need a stay-at-home wife who allows you single-minded 'devotion to work' unencumbered with family responsibilities....Masculinity holds the key to understanding why the gender revolution has stalled. As long as men continue to feel threatened by the possibility of being perceived as wimps and wusses unless they live up to the norms of conventional masculinity, we can expect little economic progress for women."
3B. "When ideal-worker norms police men into breadwinner roles, this not only hurts women. It also hurts many men who cannot live up to the breadwinner ideal. Since most American families cannot live comfortably on one income, many low-wage and working-class men, as well as many middle-class men, find themselves in the painfully demoralizing position of being unable to 'support their families.' Men are caught between an old-fashioned breadwinner ideal and an economic era that no longer delivers the family wage and are left facing two choices: they can feel terrible about themselves or they can help to change an outdated ideal. Feminists need to engage men on this issue."
4. "The business case for a more family-friendly workplace has been documented extensively for decades. Yet this evidence has had relatively little impact because stereotypes and unspoken norms either cause people to overlook the business case or to refuse to credit it. For example, the Project for Attorney Retention (which I [the author]) direct, documented over a decade ago that law firms that fail to offer non-stigmatized flexible schedules experience high rates of attrition, which creates steep costs. It costs between $200,000 and $500,000 to replace a single associate-so five associates who leave to escape 24/7 schedules cost a firm $1 to $2.5 million. Yet many law firm partners remain convinced that 'we can't afford part-timers.' Attrition costs are seen as unavoidable costs of doing business and so fade easily from consciousness. Yet every penny associated with part-time schedules is noticed, and deeply felt, because it is seen as an 'extra,' avoidable cost."
5. "Because caregiving is not high-status--whereas having a wife who takes care of all that is--many men are reluctant to admit at work that they have caregiving responsibilities."
6. "Placing masculinity at the center of a feminist analysis is not the same as placing men there. Instead it involves recognizing that workplace gender bias against women stems from masculine norms in jobs that historically were held by men. These masculine norms not only create the maternal wall, the glass ceiling, and gender wars--they also create hydraulic pressures on men to perform as ideal workers to the extent their health and social advantage allow them to do so."
7. "By the mid-1970s, feminists had divided into those who believed that women should be treated the same as men ('sameness feminists') and those who believed that women were, in fact, different from men and that courts and legislatures should recognize and act on that fact ('difference feminists')."
8. Much of the rest of the book was a HUGE discussion of those different strains of feminism and how they also worked together with assimilation feminism vs. reconstruction feminism. Basically, assimilation feminism sought to get us to the point that if a woman could act like a man and get the same results, we've gotten equality. Reconstructive feminism on the other hand, "picks up that what women need is equality-but that equality first required changing masculine norms to allow women, as well as men, to have both conventional careers and a conventional family life."
9. Another interesting section was the analysis of the book Women Don't Ask. The book asserted (or at least was interpreted to assert) that women basically only have themselves to blame for income inequality with men because they negotiate and ask for raises so much less often. This turned out to be an overly simplistic explanation based on some recent social psychological studies:
"The first experiment investigated whether subjects were willing to hire candidates who initiated a salary negotiation. The results showed that both male and female evaluators penalized female candidates who initiated salary negotiations more often than men who did so. The second experiment measured subjects' willingness to work with women who negotiated salary. The results: women, but not men, incurred a large penalty for attempting negotiations--women's penalty was 5.5 times as steep as men's--and women as well as men were less willing to work with other women who initiated salary negotiations. The third experiment involved a video of the candidate's interview rather than a resume. In that experiment, male evaluators (but not females) penalized women for salary negotiations, and they insisted on a greater degree of likeability from women job candidates than from men. The final experiment manipulated the ex of the interviewer. The results showed that when the evaluator was male, women were more reluctant than men to negotiate compensation, but this difference did not exist when the evaluator was a women.
"The researchers posed the question of whether women's greater reluctance 'to initiate negotiations over...compensation could be explained by the differential treatment of male and female negotiators' and concluded 'the answer is yes.'
10. The last part of the book I can't even begin to analyze sufficiently. It examines the class culture gap, hidden class conflicts (that Americans are loath to admit exist), and how these gaps and conflicts have kept us from making real progress in the large work-family reconciliation problems we have in the US.
I will be thinking about this book for a long time.
February 22, 2012
This book was revelatory. Professor Williams makes a very strong case that both men and women, employers and employees, will benefit from workplaces that make accommodations to the requirements of family life. Her review of grievance proceedings shows that men as often as women suffer adverse employment decisions when a crisis strikes and they must leave to take care of family emergencies. She makes a very strong case for the importance of upper middle class people taking the time and effort to understand the different values of working class families. An excellent book about the stalled women's movement. We have not solved the work/family problem and in fact have lost ground.
May 6, 2019
Measured, engaging and insightful. Williams casts a light on the consequences of the prevalence of a masculine ideal as a default in most workplaces. She dedicates a large portion of the book to addressing these consequences for the family contexts of professional-managerial and working classes respectively.
An incremental push towards "reconstructive feminism" is suggested as a solution. (In short: challenging default masculine attitides that routinely benefit men economically - although perhaps not emotionally.) As with 'White Working Class', Williams engages with the practicalities of selling the changes she wants to see politically and culturally. Once more, Williams engages with and demostrates empathy for perspectives wholly different to her own (e.g. working class pro-lifers). A scathing attack on patriarchy this is not.
Vast swathes of the policy content is US-specific (essentially the US has a *lot* of catching up to do with Europe). But her insights into attitudes to gender in the workplace can easily be applied to a British context.
Well worth reading, especially if you are a bloke.
An incremental push towards "reconstructive feminism" is suggested as a solution. (In short: challenging default masculine attitides that routinely benefit men economically - although perhaps not emotionally.) As with 'White Working Class', Williams engages with the practicalities of selling the changes she wants to see politically and culturally. Once more, Williams engages with and demostrates empathy for perspectives wholly different to her own (e.g. working class pro-lifers). A scathing attack on patriarchy this is not.
Vast swathes of the policy content is US-specific (essentially the US has a *lot* of catching up to do with Europe). But her insights into attitudes to gender in the workplace can easily be applied to a British context.
Well worth reading, especially if you are a bloke.
June 19, 2017
This is a must-read. Williams offers an incisive analysis on how class and gender are critical lenses to frame the work-family issue. Whilst inflexible workplaces often push women out, they are equally detrimental to men. The workplace has often been determined as the site which produces and reproduces the class struggle, however Williams points out aptly that class is learned at the knee of the family. The gender aspect of separate spheres also reproduces class, as much as gender. The insight that Williams brings is applicable not only to the US, but also to other countries.
January 21, 2019
Chapter 5 & 6: class/culture conflict is a bit off-topic for the book but very thought provoking. Excited to read Williams’ 2017 book on this.
September 15, 2011
This book has really been inspiring and eye opening and thought-provoking. I've thought that the concept of women 'opting out' of the workforce was an accepted norm belief-- even though it felt incorrect in some deep-seated way. But I've never really thought about what another explanation could be.
Joan Williams brings forward some very interesting hypothesis, based on significant interviews and studies and data, which state that women are actually being forced out of the workforce due to lack of workplace flexibility and options that allow them to both be a mother and be a successful worker/professional. This really resonates with me, as I also struggle with trying to maintain a level of balance between work and life. I don't want to be stay at home, but I also struggle with being a good mom who is there for my daughter and not spending every moment doing work.
The book is broken into subjects: starting with the challenges of working professional women, then blue/pink collar workers, then men in the workforce (a brilliant chapter that every father should read and internalize), and then she goes into some feminist theory which breaks down how the discussion about work/life topic and the needs of women really needs to be reframed: the discussion isn't about how women take a stand within the workforce to manage work and children; the topic really needs to be how EVERY parent creates balance, and how the workplace must change in order to create a different culture and expectation- because every parent has these issues and needs and that the inflexible expectations of work are not logical or even necessary.
I think that every parent, male or female, stay at home or working, should take some time to read this book. While they may not want to spend extensive time on the feminist theory, the concepts and challenges that she puts forth are brilliant and completely spot on.
October 20, 2013
I enjoyed this read by Joan C. Williams. I read it for my social science seminar. There is a lot of valid information without overwhelming the reader. I liked the academic yet conversational style of the book.
December 6, 2010
Joan Williams is brilliant. I wrote about it here: http://deepmuckbigrake.com/2010/12/05....
Want to read
December 3, 2010As heard on Tell Me More.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews