4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2025
⏱️ 77 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Described as having “something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is a scholar of social inequality and a prominent public intellectual. Williams is the author of 12 books and 116 academic articles in law, sociology, psychology, medical and management journals. She is the 11th most cited legal scholar both in critical theory and employment law. She is a Sullivan Professor and the Founding Director of the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco, former Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law.
She has three TED/TEDx talks, including one with over 1.3 million views. Her 2016 essay on why Trump attracted so many non-college voters went viral, with over 3.7 million reads, becoming the most-read article in the 90-year history of Harvard Business Review. She is widely known for “bias interrupters,”—an evidence-based metrics-driven approach to eradicating implicit bias introduced in the Harvard Business Review in 2014. The website  biasinterrupters.org with open-sourced toolkits for individuals and organizations has been accessed over 500,000 times. She was profiled in Financial Times and has published on class dynamics in American politics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Politico, The Hill, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.
Her work on class includes her upcoming book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class – And How to Win Them Back (forthcoming St. Martin’s, May 2025) and her critically acclaimed 2017 book White Working Class – one of three books President Biden carried, dog-eared and annotated, during his 2020 presidential campaign, according to the Washington Post.
Her work on gender includes What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know (NYU Press, 2014) and her prize-winning Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford, 1999). Williams’ work helped create the field of work-family studies, modern workplace flexibility policies, and the study of maternal wall bias in sociology.
Her work on race includes eight studies documenting how racial and gender bias play out in today’s workplaces, including two focused specifically on women of color: Pinning down the Jellyfish: Racial and Gender Bias against Women in Tech (2022) and Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias against Women of Color in STEM (2014). She is a leading voice on diversity, equity, and inclusion; with her team, she has published 39 articles published in Harvard Business Review. In 2014, she launched Bias Interrupters, a data-driven approach to interrupting bias in organizations whose website has been downloaded over half a million times.
Williams has received awards in several different fields. For her contributions to the legal profession, she is one of the few people to receive both the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award (2012) and the ABA’s Margaret Brent Women Award for Lawyers of Achievement (2006). For her contributions to the work-family field, she received the Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute (2014) and MSOM Responsible Research Award in Operations Management (2022). For her contributions to women’s advancement in engineering, she received the President’s Award from the Society of Women Engineers (2019). For contributions to psychology, she received the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology (2005).
Her work has been funded by three National Science Foundation grants, as well as grants from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the W. W. Kellogg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT as well as an honorary PhD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
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0:00.0 | All right. Here we are at the beginning of July. Happy Monday after the 4th of July weekend. |
0:09.7 | I hope that you had a good one, didn't lose any eyes or fingers, and maybe found some new ways to celebrate this wonderful country of ours and its beautiful history. |
0:18.7 | If not, I hope you got some time off and spent time |
0:22.4 | with friends and ate some nice things and your home did not burn away or float away in a flood. |
0:27.9 | I had a great weekend with friends myself. I'm in a partial staycation mode for a couple of days |
0:33.0 | here on the podcast. So today I'll have your headlines in conversation with a very, very smart woman |
0:37.9 | who went to Yale, MIT, Harvard, and later became a law professor at the University of California |
0:43.7 | Law School. Fascinating, brilliant woman who's TED Talk on diversity, equity, and inclusion, |
0:48.3 | which I didn't even really get to with her, has been seen by millions. That's right. |
0:52.0 | Professor Joan C. Williams joins me today. We spoke about |
0:55.5 | her new book about how class and how the left lost the working class and how to win them back. |
1:01.5 | Professor Williams is my guest today and I think you like it. I learn a lot from her, especially |
1:04.6 | if you look deeper into her, her books, her organization, her articles. So that's coming up. |
1:09.0 | I don't have a clip show, just got some headlines |
1:10.8 | coming up, but I do want to acknowledge what's happening in the world and invite you to a brief |
1:15.7 | hangout tonight at 8 p.m. I don't know if I'll be there at the full two to three hours this |
1:20.7 | evening, but I do look forward to seeing you at 8 p.m. And it doesn't, it's not too hard to get me to stay but I'm very very happy to have you here today |
1:28.4 | and thank you very much for pressing play and for subscribing to the podcast and I didn't mean to |
1:33.6 | make a joke about people's homes floating away in the flood at the top I'm just trying to set |
1:38.6 | the the perspective here because that is what happened to people in Texas. |
1:45.8 | I'm not sure about how many homes were lost. |
1:48.0 | I know some homes were lost in the fires in California, but certainly lives were lost in |
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