Podcast appearances and mentions of Joan Williams

The moving force behind biasinterrupters.org (an evidence-based metrics-driven approach to eradicating implicit bias) brings her perspective to bear on bridging the divide between college grads and everyone else she says has been driving politics to the far right in the United States. Joan Williams asks: Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? Her answer is that changing the class dynamics which are currently dividing American voters could do just that. Williams argues that liberals often inadvertently play into the hands of far-right politicians intent on manipulating class anger to undercut progressive goals. She says the process can be reversed by offering college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives, and how their lives reflect their privilege, while also demonstrating how working-class values reflect working-class lives. She says the far right connects culturally with the working-class by manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to obfuscate the reality that far-right economic policies often prove disadvantageous to the working-class. Join us to hear her guidance on how she says liberals can forge a multiracial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals. A Humanities Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums. OrganizerGeorge Hammond  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in 2016, Joan Williams, distinguished professor of law (emerita) at UC Law San Francisco, wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review on why President Donald Trump attracted so many non-college voters. It went viral with almost four million views, becoming the most-read article in the 90-year history of the publication.Williams' new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, outlines how the seemingly common view that her fellow progressives must abandon their social causes to win back those non-college-educated voters is wrong. What is required, she argues, is a renewed understanding of class. She introduces her conceptualization of the “diploma divide,” or the gap between Americans with and without college degrees. Her worldview divides the electorate into three class-based groups: the college-educated, upper-class “Brahmin left”, the low-income working (middle) class, and the right-wing merchant class, which pushes for economic policies that benefit the rich. Her argument is that a new coalition between the latter two has shifted politics to the right.In this week's Capitalisn't episode, Luigi and Bethany invite Williams to discuss whether our society indeed breaks down so neatly. If it does, how does her breakdown help us understand recent electoral shifts and trends in populism and why the left is on the losing end of both? As she writes in her book and discusses in the episode, “[the Brahmin] left's anger is coded as righteous. Why is non-elite anger discounted as “grievance?” Together, their conversation sheds light on how the left can win back voters without compromising on progressive values.Over the last four years, Capitalisn't has interviewed conservative thinkers like Oren Cass, Patrick Deneen, and Sohrab Ahmari to understand how the political right developed a new platform after President Joe Biden's victory in 2020. With this episode, we begin the same project with the left by asking: What could be the economic basis for a new progressive platform?Show Notes:Read an excerpt from Joan Williams' new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” out now at St. Martin's PressQuiz: “Are You in a Class Bubble?”What So Many People Don't Get About the U.S. Working Class, by Joan Williams, Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016

Scott discusses why the Democrats lost the 2024 election with Joan Williams. Also FOP President Ken Kober explains the difference between the Ryan Hinton Shooting, and the police encounter at Taste of Cincinnati. Finally Leslie Dach explains what is really happening with Medicare.

Scott discusses why the Democrats lost the 2024 election with Joan Williams. Also FOP President Ken Kober explains the difference between the Ryan Hinton Shooting, and the police encounter at Taste of Cincinnati. Finally Leslie Dach explains what is really happening with Medicare.

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Yesterday, the self-styled San Francisco “progressive” Joan Williams was on the show arguing that Democrats need to relearn the language of the American working class. But, as some of you have noted, Williams seems oblivious to the fact that politics is about more than simply aping other people's language. What you say matters, and the language of American working class, like all industrial working classes, is rooted in a critique of capitalism. She should probably read the New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy's excellent new book, Capitalism and its Critics, which traces capitalism's evolution and criticism from the East India Company through modern times. He defines capitalism as production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets, encompassing various forms from Chinese state capitalism to hyper-globalization. The book examines capitalism's most articulate critics including the Luddites, Marx, Engels, Thomas Carlisle, Adam Smith, Rosa Luxemburg, Keynes & Hayek, and contemporary figures like Sylvia Federici and Thomas Piketty. Cassidy explores how major economists were often critics of their era's dominant capitalist model, and untangles capitalism's complicated relationship with colonialism, slavery and AI which he regards as a potentially unprecedented economic disruption. This should be essential listening for all Democrats seeking to reinvent a post Biden-Harris party and message. 5 key takeaways* Capitalism has many forms - From Chinese state capitalism to Keynesian managed capitalism to hyper-globalization, all fitting the basic definition of production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets.* Great economists are typically critics - Smith criticized mercantile capitalism, Keynes critiqued laissez-faire capitalism, and Hayek/Friedman opposed managed capitalism. Each generation's leading economists challenge their era's dominant model.* Modern corporate structure has deep roots - The East India Company was essentially a modern multinational corporation with headquarters, board of directors, stockholders, and even a private army - showing capitalism's organizational continuity across centuries.* Capitalism is intertwined with colonialism and slavery - Industrial capitalism was built on pre-existing colonial and slave systems, particularly through the cotton industry and plantation economies.* AI represents a potentially unprecedented disruption - Unlike previous technological waves, AI may substitute rather than complement human labor on a massive scale, potentially creating political backlash exceeding even the "China shock" that contributed to Trump's rise.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full TranscriptAndrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A couple of days ago, we did a show with Joan Williams. She has a new book out, "Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back." A book about language, about how to talk to the American working class. She also had a piece in Jacobin Magazine, an anti-capitalist magazine, about how the left needs to speak to what she calls average American values. We talked, of course, about Bernie Sanders and AOC and their language of fighting oligarchy, and the New York Times followed that up with "The Enduring Power of Anti-Capitalism in American Politics."But of course, that brings the question: what exactly is capitalism? I did a little bit of research. We can find definitions of capitalism from AI, from Wikipedia, even from online dictionaries, but I thought we might do a little better than relying on Wikipedia and come to a man who's given capitalism and its critics a great deal of thought. John Cassidy is well known as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He's the author of a wonderful book, the best book, actually, on the dot-com insanity. And his new book, "Capitalism and its Critics," is out this week. John, congratulations on the book.So I've got to be a bit of a schoolmaster with you, John, and get some definitions first. What exactly is capitalism before we get to criticism of it?John Cassidy: Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question, Andrew. Obviously, through the decades, even the centuries, there have been many different definitions of the term capitalism and there are different types of capitalism. To not be sort of too ideological about it, the working definition I use is basically production for profit—that could be production of goods or mostly in the new and, you know, in today's economy, production of services—for profit by companies which are privately owned in markets. That's a very sort of all-encompassing definition.Within that, you can have all sorts of different types of capitalism. You can have Chinese state capitalism, you can have the old mercantilism, which industrial capitalism came after, which Trump seems to be trying to resurrect. You can have Keynesian managed capitalism that we had for 30 or 40 years after the Second World War, which I grew up in in the UK. Or you can have sort of hyper-globalization, hyper-capitalism that we've tried for the last 30 years. There are all those different varieties of capitalism consistent with a basic definition, I think.Andrew Keen: That keeps you busy, John. I know you started this project, which is a big book and it's a wonderful book. I read it. I don't always read all the books I have on the show, but I read from cover to cover full of remarkable stories of the critics of capitalism. You note in the beginning that you began this in 2016 with the beginnings of Trump. What was it about the 2016 election that triggered a book about capitalism and its critics?John Cassidy: Well, I was reporting on it at the time for The New Yorker and it struck me—I covered, I basically covered the economy in various forms for various publications since the late 80s, early 90s. In fact, one of my first big stories was the stock market crash of '87. So yes, I am that old. But it seemed to me in 2016 when you had Bernie Sanders running from the left and Trump running from the right, but both in some way offering very sort of similar critiques of capitalism. People forget that Trump in 2016 actually was running from the left of the Republican Party. He was attacking big business. He was attacking Wall Street. He doesn't do that these days very much, but at the time he was very much posing as the sort of outsider here to protect the interests of the average working man.And it seemed to me that when you had this sort of pincer movement against the then ruling model, this wasn't just a one-off. It seemed to me it was a sort of an emerging crisis of legitimacy for the system. And I thought there could be a good book written about how we got to here. And originally I thought it would be a relatively short book just based on the last sort of 20 or 30 years since the collapse of the Cold War and the sort of triumphalism of the early 90s.But as I got into it more and more, I realized that so many of the issues which had been raised, things like globalization, rising inequality, monopoly power, exploitation, even pollution and climate change, these issues go back to the very start of the capitalist system or the industrial capitalist system back in sort of late 18th century, early 19th century Britain. So I thought, in the end, I thought, you know what, let's just do the whole thing soup to nuts through the eyes of the critics.There have obviously been many, many histories of capitalism written. I thought that an original way to do it, or hopefully original, would be to do a sort of a narrative through the lives and the critiques of the critics of various stages. So that's, I hope, what sets it apart from other books on the subject, and also provides a sort of narrative frame because, you know, I am a New Yorker writer, I realize if you want people to read things, you've got to make it readable. Easiest way to make things readable is to center them around people. People love reading about other people. So that's sort of the narrative frame. I start off with a whistleblower from the East India Company back in the—Andrew Keen: Yeah, I want to come to that. But before, John, my sense is that to simplify what you're saying, this is a labor of love. You're originally from Leeds, the heart of Yorkshire, the center of the very industrial revolution, the first industrial revolution where, in your historical analysis, capitalism was born. Is it a labor of love? What's your family relationship with capitalism? How long was the family in Leeds?John Cassidy: Right, I mean that's a very good question. It is a labor of love in a way, but it's not—our family doesn't go—I'm from an Irish family, family of Irish immigrants who moved to England in the 1940s and 1950s. So my father actually did start working in a big mill, the Kirkstall Forge in Leeds, which is a big steel mill, and he left after seeing one of his co-workers have his arms chopped off in one of the machinery, so he decided it wasn't for him and he spent his life working in the construction industry, which was dominated by immigrants as it is here now.So I don't have a—it's not like I go back to sort of the start of the industrial revolution, but I did grow up in the middle of Leeds, very working class, very industrial neighborhood. And what a sort of irony is, I'll point out, I used to, when I was a kid, I used to play golf on a municipal golf course called Gotts Park in Leeds, which—you know, most golf courses in America are sort of in the affluent suburbs, country clubs. This was right in the middle of Armley in Leeds, which is where the Victorian jail is and a very rough neighborhood. There's a small bit of land which they built a golf course on. It turns out it was named after one of the very first industrialists, Benjamin Gott, who was a wool and textile industrialist, and who played a part in the Luddite movement, which I mention.So it turns out, I was there when I was 11 or 12, just learning how to play golf on this scrappy golf course. And here I am, 50 years later, writing about Benjamin Gott at the start of the Industrial Revolution. So yeah, no, sure. I think it speaks to me in a way that perhaps it wouldn't to somebody else from a different background.Andrew Keen: We did a show with William Dalrymple, actually, a couple of years ago. He's been on actually since, the Anglo or Scottish Indian historian. His book on the East India Company, "The Anarchy," is a classic. You begin in some ways your history of capitalism with the East India Company. What was it about the East India Company, John, that makes it different from other for-profit organizations in economic, Western economic history?John Cassidy: I mean, I read that. It's a great book, by the way. That was actually quoted in my chapter on these. Yeah, I remember. I mean, the reason I focused on it was for two reasons. Number one, I was looking for a start, a narrative start to the book. And it seemed to me, you know, the obvious place to start is with the start of the industrial revolution. If you look at economics history textbooks, that's where they always start with Arkwright and all the inventors, you know, who were the sort of techno-entrepreneurs of their time, the sort of British Silicon Valley, if you could think of it as, in Lancashire and Derbyshire in the late 18th century.So I knew I had to sort of start there in some way, but I thought that's a bit pat. Is there another way into it? And it turns out that in 1772 in England, there was a huge bailout of the East India Company, very much like the sort of 2008, 2009 bailout of Wall Street. The company got into trouble. So I thought, you know, maybe there's something there. And I eventually found this guy, William Bolts, who worked for the East India Company, turned into a whistleblower after he was fired for finagling in India like lots of the people who worked for the company did.So that gave me two things. Number one, it gave me—you know, I'm a writer, so it gave me something to focus on a narrative. His personal history is very interesting. But number two, it gave me a sort of foundation because industrial capitalism didn't come from nowhere. You know, it was built on top of a pre-existing form of capitalism, which we now call mercantile capitalism, which was very protectionist, which speaks to us now. But also it had these big monopolistic multinational companies.The East India Company, in some ways, was a very modern corporation. It had a headquarters in Leadenhall Street in the city of London. It had a board of directors, it had stockholders, the company sent out very detailed instructions to the people in the field in India and Indonesia and Malaysia who were traders who bought things from the locals there, brought them back to England on their company ships. They had a company army even to enforce—to protect their operations there. It was an incredible multinational corporation.So that was also, I think, fascinating because it showed that even in the pre-existing system, you know, big corporations existed, there were monopolies, they had royal monopolies given—first the East India Company got one from Queen Elizabeth. But in some ways, they were very similar to modern monopolistic corporations. And they had some of the problems we've seen with modern monopolistic corporations, the way they acted. And Bolts was the sort of first corporate whistleblower, I thought. Yeah, that was a way of sort of getting into the story, I think. Hopefully, you know, it's just a good read, I think.William Bolts's story because he was—he came from nowhere, he was Dutch, he wasn't even English and he joined the company as a sort of impoverished young man, went to India like a lot of English minor aristocrats did to sort of make your fortune. The way the company worked, you had to sort of work on company time and make as much money as you could for the company, but then in your spare time you're allowed to trade for yourself. So a lot of the—without getting into too much detail, but you know, English aristocracy was based on—you know, the eldest child inherits everything, so if you were the younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, you actually didn't inherit anything. So all of these minor aristocrats, so major aristocrats, but who weren't first born, joined the East India Company, went out to India and made a fortune, and then came back and built huge houses. Lots of the great manor houses in southern England were built by people from the East India Company and they were known as Nabobs, which is an Indian term. So they were the sort of, you know, billionaires of their time, and it was based on—as I say, it wasn't based on industrial capitalism, it was based on mercantile capitalism.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the beginning of the book, which focuses on Bolts and the East India Company, brings to mind for me two things. Firstly, the intimacy of modern capitalism, modern industrial capitalism with colonialism and of course slavery—lots of books have been written on that. Touch on this and also the relationship between the birth of capitalism and the birth of liberalism or democracy. John Stuart Mill, of course, the father in many ways of Western democracy. His day job, ironically enough, or perhaps not ironically, was at the East India Company. So how do those two things connect, or is it just coincidental?John Cassidy: Well, I don't think it is entirely coincidental, I mean, J.S. Mill—his father, James Mill, was also a well-known philosopher in the sort of, obviously, in the earlier generation, earlier than him. And he actually wrote the official history of the East India Company. And I think they gave his son, the sort of brilliant protégé, J.S. Mill, a job as largely as a sort of sinecure, I think. But he did go in and work there in the offices three or four days a week.But I think it does show how sort of integral—the sort of—as you say, the inheritor and the servant in Britain, particularly, of colonial capitalism was. So the East India Company was, you know, it was in decline by that stage in the middle of the 19th century, but it didn't actually give up its monopoly. It wasn't forced to give up its monopoly on the Indian trade until 1857, after, you know, some notorious massacres and there was a sort of public outcry.So yeah, no, that's—it's very interesting that the British—it's sort of unique to Britain in a way, but it's interesting that industrial capitalism arose alongside this pre-existing capitalist structure and somebody like Mill is a sort of paradoxical figure because actually he was quite critical of aspects of industrial capitalism and supported sort of taxes on the rich, even though he's known as the great, you know, one of the great apostles of the free market and free market liberalism. And his day job, as you say, he was working for the East India Company.Andrew Keen: What about the relationship between the birth of industrial capitalism, colonialism and slavery? Those are big questions and I know you deal with them in some—John Cassidy: I think you can't just write an economic history of capitalism now just starting with the cotton industry and say, you know, it was all about—it was all about just technical progress and gadgets, etc. It was built on a sort of pre-existing system which was colonial and, you know, the slave trade was a central element of that. Now, as you say, there have been lots and lots of books written about it, the whole 1619 project got an incredible amount of attention a few years ago. So I didn't really want to rehash all that, but I did want to acknowledge the sort of role of slavery, especially in the rise of the cotton industry because of course, a lot of the raw cotton was grown in the plantations in the American South.So the way I actually ended up doing that was by writing a chapter about Eric Williams, a Trinidadian writer who ended up as the Prime Minister of Trinidad when it became independent in the 1960s. But when he was younger, he wrote a book which is now regarded as a classic. He went to Oxford to do a PhD, won a scholarship. He was very smart. I won a sort of Oxford scholarship myself but 50 years before that, he came across the Atlantic and did an undergraduate degree in history and then did a PhD there and his PhD thesis was on slavery and capitalism.And at the time, in the 1930s, the link really wasn't acknowledged. You could read any sort of standard economic history written by British historians, and they completely ignored that. He made the argument that, you know, slavery was integral to the rise of capitalism and he basically started an argument which has been raging ever since the 1930s and, you know, if you want to study economic history now you have to sort of—you know, have to have to address that. And the way I thought, even though the—it's called the Williams thesis is very famous. I don't think many people knew much about where it came from. So I thought I'd do a chapter on—Andrew Keen: Yeah, that chapter is excellent. You mentioned earlier the Luddites, you're from Yorkshire where Luddism in some ways was born. One of the early chapters is on the Luddites. We did a show with Brian Merchant, his book, "Blood in the Machine," has done very well, I'm sure you're familiar with it. I always understood the Luddites as being against industrialization, against the machine, as opposed to being against capitalism. But did those two things get muddled together in the history of the Luddites?John Cassidy: I think they did. I mean, you know, Luddites, when we grew up, I mean you're English too, you know to be called a Luddite was a term of abuse, right? You know, you were sort of antediluvian, anti-technology, you're stupid. It was only, I think, with the sort of computer revolution, the tech revolution of the last 30, 40 years and the sort of disruptions it's caused, that people have started to look back at the Luddites and say, perhaps they had a point.For them, they were basically pre-industrial capitalism artisans. They worked for profit-making concerns, small workshops. Some of them worked for themselves, so they were sort of sole proprietor capitalists. Or they worked in small venues, but the rise of industrial capitalism, factory capitalism or whatever, basically took away their livelihoods progressively. So they associated capitalism with new technology. In their minds it was the same. But their argument wasn't really a technological one or even an economic one, it was more a moral one. They basically made the moral argument that capitalists shouldn't have the right to just take away their livelihoods with no sort of recompense for them.At the time they didn't have any parliamentary representation. You know, they weren't revolutionaries. The first thing they did was create petitions to try and get parliament to step in, sort of introduce some regulation here. They got turned down repeatedly by the sort of—even though it was a very aristocratic parliament, places like Manchester and Leeds didn't have any representation at all. So it was only after that that they sort of turned violent and started, you know, smashing machines and machines, I think, were sort of symbols of the system, which they saw as morally unjust.And I think that's sort of what—obviously, there's, you know, a lot of technological disruption now, so we can, especially as it starts to come for the educated cognitive class, we can sort of sympathize with them more. But I think the sort of moral critique that there's this, you know, underneath the sort of great creativity and economic growth that capitalism produces, there is also a lot of destruction and a lot of victims. And I think that message, you know, is becoming a lot more—that's why I think why they've been rediscovered in the last five or ten years and I'm one of the people I guess contributing to that rediscovery.Andrew Keen: There's obviously many critiques of capitalism politically. I want to come to Marx in a second, but your chapter, I thought, on Thomas Carlyle and this nostalgic conservatism was very important and there are other conservatives as well. John, do you think that—and you mentioned Trump earlier, who is essentially a nostalgist for a—I don't know, some sort of bizarre pre-capitalist age in America. Is there something particularly powerful about the anti-capitalism of romantics like Carlyle, 19th century Englishman, there were many others of course.John Cassidy: Well, I think so. I mean, I think what is—conservatism, when we were young anyway, was associated with Thatcherism and Reaganism, which, you know, lionized the free market and free market capitalism and was a reaction against the pre-existing form of capitalism, Keynesian capitalism of the sort of 40s to the 80s. But I think what got lost in that era was the fact that there have always been—you've got Hayek up there, obviously—Andrew Keen: And then Keynes and Hayek, the two—John Cassidy: Right, it goes to the end of that. They had a great debate in the 1930s about these issues. But Hayek really wasn't a conservative person, and neither was Milton Friedman. They were sort of free market revolutionaries, really, that you'd let the market rip and it does good things. And I think that that sort of a view, you know, it just became very powerful. But we sort of lost sight of the fact that there was also a much older tradition of sort of suspicion of radical changes of any type. And that was what conservatism was about to some extent. If you think about Baldwin in Britain, for example.And there was a sort of—during the Industrial Revolution, some of the strongest supporters of factory acts to reduce hours and hourly wages for women and kids were actually conservatives, Tories, as they were called at the time, like Ashley. That tradition, Carlyle was a sort of extreme representative of that. I mean, Carlyle was a sort of proto-fascist, let's not romanticize him, he lionized strongmen, Frederick the Great, and he didn't really believe in democracy. But he also had—he was appalled by the sort of, you know, the—like, what's the phrase I'm looking for? The sort of destructive aspects of industrial capitalism, both on the workers, you know, he said it was a dehumanizing system, sounded like Marx in some ways. That it dehumanized the workers, but also it destroyed the environment.He was an early environmentalist. He venerated the environment, was actually very strongly linked to the transcendentalists in America, people like Thoreau, who went to visit him when he visited Britain and he saw the sort of destructive impact that capitalism was having locally in places like Manchester, which were filthy with filthy rivers, etc. So he just saw the whole system as sort of morally bankrupt and he was a great writer, Carlyle, whatever you think of him. Great user of language, so he has these great ringing phrases like, you know, the cash nexus or calling it the Gospel of Mammonism, the shabbiest gospel ever preached under the sun was industrial capitalism.So, again, you know, that's a sort of paradoxical thing, because I think for so long conservatism was associated with, you know, with support for the free market and still is in most of the Republican Party, but then along comes Trump and sort of conquers the party with a, you know, more skeptical, as you say, romantic, not really based on any reality, but a sort of romantic view that America can stand by itself in the world. I mean, I see Trump actually as a sort of an effort to sort of throw back to mercantile capitalism in a way. You know, which was not just pre-industrial, but was also pre-democracy, run by monarchs, which I'm sure appeals to him, and it was based on, you know, large—there were large tariffs. You couldn't import things in the UK. If you want to import anything to the UK, you have to send it on a British ship because of the navigation laws. It was a very protectionist system and it's actually, you know, as I said, had a lot of parallels with what Trump's trying to do or tries to do until he backs off.Andrew Keen: You cheat a little bit in the book in the sense that you—everyone has their own chapter. We'll talk a little bit about Hayek and Smith and Lenin and Friedman. You do have one chapter on Marx, but you also have a chapter on Engels. So you kind of cheat. You combine the two. Is it possible, though, to do—and you've just written this book, so you know this as well as anyone. How do you write a book about capitalism and its critics and only really give one chapter to Marx, who is so dominant? I mean, you've got lots of Marxists in the book, including Lenin and Luxemburg. How fundamental is Marx to a criticism of capitalism? Is most criticism, especially from the left, from progressives, is it really just all a footnote to Marx?John Cassidy: I wouldn't go that far, but I think obviously on the left he is the central figure. But there's an element of sort of trying to rebuild Engels a bit in this. I mean, I think of Engels and Marx—I mean obviously Marx wrote the great classic "Capital," etc. But in the 1840s, when they both started writing about capitalism, Engels was sort of ahead of Marx in some ways. I mean, the sort of materialist concept, the idea that economics rules everything, Engels actually was the first one to come up with that in an essay in the 1840s which Marx then published in one of his—in the German newspaper he worked for at the time, radical newspaper, and he acknowledged openly that that was really what got him thinking seriously about economics, and even in the late—in 20, 25 years later when he wrote "Capital," all three volumes of it and the Grundrisse, just these enormous outpourings of analysis on capitalism.He acknowledged Engels's role in that and obviously Engels wrote the first draft of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 too, which Marx then topped and tailed and—he was a better writer obviously, Marx, and he gave it the dramatic language that we all know it for. So I think Engels and Marx together obviously are the central sort of figures in the sort of left-wing critique. But they didn't start out like that. I mean, they were very obscure, you've got to remember.You know, they were—when they were writing, Marx was writing "Capital" in London, it never even got published in English for another 20 years. It was just published in German. He was basically an expat. He had been thrown out of Germany, he had been thrown out of France, so England was last resort and the British didn't consider him a threat so they were happy to let him and the rest of the German sort of left in there. I think it became—it became the sort of epochal figure after his death really, I think, when he was picked up by the left-wing parties, which are especially the SPD in Germany, which was the first sort of socialist mass party and was officially Marxist until the First World War and there were great internal debates.And then of course, because Lenin and the Russians came out of that tradition too, Marxism then became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union when they adopted a version of it. And again there were massive internal arguments about what Marx really meant, and in fact, you know, one interpretation of the last 150 years of left-wing sort of intellectual development is as a sort of argument about what did Marx really mean and what are the important bits of it, what are the less essential bits of it. It's a bit like the "what did Keynes really mean" that you get in liberal circles.So yeah, Marx, obviously, this is basically an intellectual history of critiques of capitalism. In that frame, he is absolutely a central figure. Why didn't I give him more space than a chapter and a chapter and a half with Engels? There have been a million books written about Marx. I mean, it's not that—it's not that he's an unknown figure. You know, there's a best-selling book written in Britain about 20 years ago about him and then I was quoting, in my biographical research, I relied on some more recent, more scholarly biographies. So he's an endlessly fascinating figure but I didn't want him to dominate the book so I gave him basically the same space as everybody else.Andrew Keen: You've got, as I said, you've got a chapter on Adam Smith who's often considered the father of economics. You've got a chapter on Keynes. You've got a chapter on Friedman. And you've got a chapter on Hayek, all the great modern economists. Is it possible, John, to be a distinguished economist one way or the other and not be a critic of capitalism?John Cassidy: Well, I don't—I mean, I think history would suggest that the greatest economists have been critics of capitalism in their own time. People would say to me, what the hell have you got Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in a book about critics of capitalism? They were great exponents, defenders of capitalism. They loved the system. That is perfectly true. But in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, middle of the 20th century, they were actually arch-critics of the ruling form of capitalism at the time, which was what I call managed capitalism. What some people call Keynesianism, what other people call European social democracy, whatever you call it, it was a model of a mixed economy in which the government played a large role both in propping up demand and in providing an extensive social safety net in the UK and providing public healthcare and public education. It was a sort of hybrid model.Most of the economy in terms of the businesses remained in private hands. So most production was capitalistic. It was a capitalist system. They didn't go to the Soviet model of nationalizing everything and Britain did nationalize some businesses, but most places didn't. The US of course didn't but it was a form of managed capitalism. And Hayek and Friedman were both great critics of that and wanted to sort of move back to 19th century laissez-faire model.Keynes was a—was actually a great, I view him anyway, as really a sort of late Victorian liberal and was trying to protect as much of the sort of J.S. Mill view of the world as he could, but he thought capitalism had one fatal flaw: that it tended to fall into recessions and then they can snowball and the whole system can collapse which is what had basically happened in the early 1930s until Keynesian policies were adopted. Keynes sort of differed from a lot of his followers—I have a chapter on Joan Robinson in there, who were pretty left-wing and wanted to sort of use Keynesianism as a way to shift the economy quite far to the left. Keynes didn't really believe in that. He has a famous quote that, you know, once you get to full employment, you can then rely on the free market to sort of take care of things. He was still a liberal at heart.Going back to Adam Smith, why is he in a book on criticism of capitalism? And again, it goes back to what I said at the beginning. He actually wrote "The Wealth of Nations"—he explains in the introduction—as a critique of mercantile capitalism. His argument was that he was a pro-free trader, pro-small business, free enterprise. His argument was if you get the government out of the way, we don't need these government-sponsored monopolies like the East India Company. If you just rely on the market, the sort of market forces and competition will produce a good outcome. So then he was seen as a great—you know, he is then seen as the apostle of free market capitalism. I mean when I started as a young reporter, when I used to report in Washington, all the conservatives used to wear Adam Smith badges. You don't see Donald Trump wearing an Adam Smith badge, but that was the case.He was also—the other aspect of Smith, which I highlight, which is not often remarked on—he's also a critic of big business. He has a famous section where he discusses the sort of tendency of any group of more than three businessmen when they get together to try and raise prices and conspire against consumers. And he was very suspicious of, as I say, large companies, monopolies. I think if Adam Smith existed today, I mean, I think he would be a big supporter of Lina Khan and the sort of antitrust movement, he would say capitalism is great as long as you have competition, but if you don't have competition it becomes, you know, exploitative.Andrew Keen: Yeah, if Smith came back to live today, you have a chapter on Thomas Piketty, maybe he may not be French, but he may be taking that position about how the rich benefit from the structure of investment. Piketty's core—I've never had Piketty on the show, but I've had some of his followers like Emmanuel Saez from Berkeley. Yeah. How powerful is Piketty's critique of capitalism within the context of the classical economic analysis from Hayek and Friedman? Yeah, it's a very good question.John Cassidy: It's a very good question. I mean, he's a very paradoxical figure, Piketty, in that he obviously shot to world fame and stardom with his book on capital in the 21st century, which in some ways he obviously used the capital as a way of linking himself to Marx, even though he said he never read Marx. But he was basically making the same argument that if you leave capitalism unrestrained and don't do anything about monopolies etc. or wealth, you're going to get massive inequality and he—I think his great contribution, Piketty and the school of people, one of them you mentioned, around him was we sort of had a vague idea that inequality was going up and that, you know, wages were stagnating, etc.What he and his colleagues did is they produced these sort of scientific empirical studies showing in very simple to understand terms how the sort of share of income and wealth of the top 10 percent, the top 5 percent, the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent basically skyrocketed from the 1970s to about 2010. And it was, you know, he was an MIT PhD. Saez, who you mentioned, is a Berkeley professor. They were schooled in neoclassical economics at Harvard and MIT and places like that. So the right couldn't dismiss them as sort of, you know, lefties or Trots or whatever who're just sort of making this stuff up. They had to acknowledge that this was actually an empirical reality.I think it did change the whole basis of the debate and it was sort of part of this reaction against capitalism in the 2010s. You know it was obviously linked to the sort of Sanders and the Occupy Wall Street movement at the time. It came out of the—you know, the financial crisis as well when Wall Street disgraced itself. I mean, I wrote a previous book on all that, but people have sort of, I think, forgotten the great reaction against that a decade ago, which I think even Trump sort of exploited, as I say, by using anti-banker rhetoric at the time.So, Piketty was a great figure, I think, from, you know, I was thinking, who are the most influential critics of capitalism in the 21st century? And I think you'd have to put him up there on the list. I'm not saying he's the only one or the most eminent one. But I think he is a central figure. Now, of course, you'd think, well, this is a really powerful critic of capitalism, and nobody's going to pick up, and Bernie's going to take off and everything. But here we are a decade later now. It seems to be what the backlash has produced is a swing to the right, not a swing to the left. So that's, again, a sort of paradox.Andrew Keen: One person I didn't expect to come up in the book, John, and I was fascinated with this chapter, is Silvia Federici. I've tried to get her on the show. We've had some books about her writing and her kind of—I don't know, you treat her critique as a feminist one. The role of women. Why did you choose to write a chapter about Federici and that feminist critique of capitalism?John Cassidy: Right, right. Well, I don't think it was just feminist. I'll explain what I think it was. Two reasons. Number one, I wanted to get more women into the book. I mean, it's in some sense, it is a history of economics and economic critiques. And they are overwhelmingly written by men and women were sort of written out of the narrative of capitalism for a very long time. So I tried to include as many sort of women as actual thinkers as I could and I have a couple of early socialist feminist thinkers, Anna Wheeler and Flora Tristan and then I cover some of the—I cover Rosa Luxemburg as the great sort of tribune of the left revolutionary socialist, communist whatever you want to call it. Anti-capitalist I think is probably also important to note about. Yeah, and then I also have Joan Robinson, but I wanted somebody to do something in the modern era, and I thought Federici, in the world of the Wages for Housework movement, is very interesting from two perspectives.Number one, Federici herself is a Marxist, and I think she probably would still consider herself a revolutionary. She's based in New York, as you know now. She lived in New York for 50 years, but she came from—she's originally Italian and came out of the Italian left in the 1960s, which was very radical. Do you know her? Did you talk to her? I didn't talk to her on this. No, she—I basically relied on, there has been a lot of, as you say, there's been a lot of stuff written about her over the years. She's written, you know, she's given various long interviews and she's written a book herself, a version, a history of housework, so I figured it was all there and it was just a matter of pulling it together.But I think the critique, why the critique is interesting, most of the book is a sort of critique of how capitalism works, you know, in the production or you know, in factories or in offices or you know, wherever capitalist operations are working, but her critique is sort of domestic reproduction, as she calls it, the role of unpaid labor in supporting capitalism. I mean it goes back a long way actually. There was this moment, I sort of trace it back to the 1940s and 1950s when there were feminists in America who were demonstrating outside factories and making the point that you know, the factory workers and the operations of the factory, it couldn't—there's one of the famous sort of tire factory in California demonstrations where the women made the argument, look this factory can't continue to operate unless we feed and clothe the workers and provide the next generation of workers. You know, that's domestic reproduction. So their argument was that housework should be paid and Federici took that idea and a couple of her colleagues, she founded the—it's a global movement, but she founded the most famous branch in New York City in the 1970s. In Park Slope near where I live actually.And they were—you call it feminists, they were feminists in a way, but they were rejected by the sort of mainstream feminist movement, the sort of Gloria Steinems of the world, who Federici was very critical of because she said they ignored, they really just wanted to get women ahead in the sort of capitalist economy and they ignored the sort of underlying from her perspective, the underlying sort of illegitimacy and exploitation of that system. So they were never accepted as part of the feminist movement. They're to the left of the Feminist Movement.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Keynes, of course, so central in all this, particularly his analysis of the role of automation in capitalism. We did a show recently with Robert Skidelsky and I'm sure you're familiar—John Cassidy: Yeah, yeah, great, great biography of Keynes.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the great biographer of Keynes, whose latest book is "Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of AI." You yourself wrote a brilliant book on the last tech mania and dot-com capitalism. I used it in a lot of my writing and books. What's your analysis of AI in this latest mania and the role generally of manias in the history of capitalism and indeed in critiquing capitalism? Is AI just the next chapter of the dot-com boom?John Cassidy: I think it's a very deep question. I think I'd give two answers to it. In one sense it is just the latest mania the way—I mean, the way capitalism works is we have these, I go back to Kondratiev, one of my Russian economists who ended up being killed by Stalin. He was the sort of inventor of the long wave theory of capitalism. We have these short waves where you have sort of booms and busts driven by finance and debt etc. But we also have long waves driven by technology.And obviously, in the last 40, 50 years, the two big ones are the original deployment of the internet and microchip technology in the sort of 80s and 90s culminating in the dot-com boom of the late 90s, which as you say, I wrote about. Thanks very much for your kind comments on the book. If you just sort of compare it from a financial basis I think they are very similar just in terms of the sort of role of hype from Wall Street in hyping up these companies. The sort of FOMO aspect of it among investors that they you know, you can't miss out. So just buy the companies blindly. And the sort of lionization in the press and the media of, you know, of AI as the sort of great wave of the future.So if you take a sort of skeptical market based approach, I would say, yeah, this is just another sort of another mania which will eventually burst and it looked like it had burst for a few weeks when Trump put the tariffs up, now the market seemed to be recovering. But I think there is, there may be something new about it. I am not, I don't pretend to be a technical expert. I try to rely on the evidence of or the testimony of people who know the systems well and also economists who have studied it. It seems to me the closer you get to it the more alarming it is in terms of the potential shock value that there is there.I mean Trump and the sort of reaction to a larger extent can be traced back to the China shock where we had this global shock to American manufacturing and sort of hollowed out a lot of the industrial areas much of it, like industrial Britain was hollowed out in the 80s. If you, you know, even people like Altman and Elon Musk, they seem to think that this is going to be on a much larger scale than that and will basically, you know, get rid of the professions as they exist. Which would be a huge, huge shock. And I think a lot of the economists who studied this, who four or five years ago were relatively optimistic, people like Daron Acemoglu, David Autor—Andrew Keen: Simon Johnson, of course, who just won the Nobel Prize, and he's from England.John Cassidy: Simon, I did an event with Simon earlier this week. You know they've studied this a lot more closely than I have but I do interview them and I think five, six years ago they were sort of optimistic that you know this could just be a new steam engine or could be a microchip which would lead to sort of a lot more growth, rising productivity, rising productivity is usually associated with rising wages so sure there'd be short-term costs but ultimately it would be a good thing. Now, I think if you speak to them, they see since the, you know, obviously, the OpenAI—the original launch and now there's just this huge arms race with no government involvement at all I think they're coming to the conclusion that rather than being developed to sort of complement human labor, all these systems are just being rushed out to substitute for human labor. And it's just going, if current trends persist, it's going to be a China shock on an even bigger scale.You know what is going to, if that, if they're right, that is going to produce some huge political backlash at some point, that's inevitable. So I know—the thing when the dot-com bubble burst, it didn't really have that much long-term impact on the economy. People lost the sort of fake money they thought they'd made. And then the companies, obviously some of the companies like Amazon and you know Google were real genuine profit-making companies and if you bought them early you made a fortune. But AI does seem a sort of bigger, scarier phenomenon to me. I don't know. I mean, you're close to it. What do you think?Andrew Keen: Well, I'm waiting for a book, John, from you. I think you can combine dot-com and capitalism and its critics. We need you probably to cover it—you know more about it than me. Final question, I mean, it's a wonderful book and we haven't even scratched the surface everyone needs to get it. I enjoyed the chapter, for example, on Karl Polanyi and so much more. I mean, it's a big book. But my final question, John, is do you have any regrets about anyone you left out? The one person I would have liked to have been included was Rawls because of his sort of treatment of capitalism and luck as a kind of casino. I'm not sure whether you gave any thought to Rawls, but is there someone in retrospect you should have had a chapter on that you left out?John Cassidy: There are lots of people I left out. I mean, that's the problem. I mean there have been hundreds and hundreds of critics of capitalism. Rawls, of course, incredibly influential and his idea of the sort of, you know, the veil of ignorance that you should judge things not knowing where you are in the income distribution and then—Andrew Keen: And it's luck. I mean the idea of some people get lucky and some people don't.John Cassidy: It is the luck of the draw, obviously, what card you pull. I think that is a very powerful critique, but I just—because I am more of an expert on economics, I tended to leave out philosophers and sociologists. I mean, you know, you could say, where's Max Weber? Where are the anarchists? You know, where's Emma Goldman? Where's John Kenneth Galbraith, the sort of great mid-century critic of American industrial capitalism? There's so many people that you could include. I mean, I could have written 10 volumes. In fact, I refer in the book to, you know, there's always been a problem. G.D.H. Cole, a famous English historian, wrote a history of socialism back in the 1960s and 70s. You know, just getting to 1850 took him six volumes. So, you've got to pick and choose, and I don't claim this is the history of capitalism and its critics. That would be a ridiculous claim to make. I just claim it's a history written by me, and hopefully the people are interested in it, and they're sufficiently diverse that you can address all the big questions.Andrew Keen: Well it's certainly incredibly timely. Capitalism and its critics—more and more of them. Sometimes they don't even describe themselves as critics of capitalism when they're talking about oligarchs or billionaires, they're really criticizing capitalism. A must read from one of America's leading journalists. And would you call yourself a critic of capitalism, John?John Cassidy: Yeah, I guess I am, to some extent, sure. I mean, I'm not a—you know, I'm not on the far left, but I'd say I'm a center-left critic of capitalism. Yes, definitely, that would be fair.Andrew Keen: And does the left need to learn? Does everyone on the left need to read the book and learn the language of anti-capitalism in a more coherent and honest way?John Cassidy: I hope so. I mean, obviously, I'd be talking my own book there, as they say, but I hope that people on the left, but not just people on the left. I really did try to sort of be fair to the sort of right-wing critiques as well. I included the Carlyle chapter particularly, obviously, but in the later chapters, I also sort of refer to this emerging critique on the right, the sort of economic nationalist critique. So hopefully, I think people on the right could read it to understand the critiques from the left, and people on the left could read it to understand some of the critiques on the right as well.Andrew Keen: Well, it's a lovely book. It's enormously erudite and simultaneously readable. Anyone who likes John Cassidy's work from The New Yorker will love it. Congratulations, John, on the new book, and I'd love to get you back on the show as anti-capitalism in America picks up steam and perhaps manifests itself in the 2028 election. Thank you so much.John Cassidy: Thanks very much for inviting me on, it was fun.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In her new book, "Outclassed," Professor Joan Williams says if liberals want to win, they must change the class dynamics driving US politics.

Why are the Democrats losing the American working class? According to Joan Williams, it's because they are failing to prioritize economic concerns of working-class Americans. In her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Williams argues that Democrats lost the 2024 election because of their over-preoccupation with the interests of college educated Americans. Williams notes significant shifts among non-college voters of color toward Republicans and believes Democrats must develop what she calls "cultural competence" to connect with working-class voters. She emphasizes that economic struggle, and not just racism, drove Trump's victory. Williams advocates for a messaging that resonates with working-class values while maintaining progressive goals on issues like climate change. Democrats, she suggests, must return to their traditional language and prioritize economic stability for all Americans if they are to win back power in 2028. Five Key Takeaways * Democrats lost working-class voters across racial groups in 2024, with significant shifts among non-college voters of color (35-point shift among Latinos and 30-point shift among Black voters) and even larger shifts among younger voters of color.* Williams argues that economic factors, not just racism, drove Trump's victory. She believes Democrats failed to prioritize inflation and economic issues that matter most to working-class Americans, focusing instead on issues that primarily resonate with college-educated elites.* The "class-culture gap" between college-educated elites and working-class Americans requires Democrats to develop "cultural competence" - understanding and connecting with the values, communication styles, and priorities of non-college educated voters.* Williams believes Democrats must center economic messaging on the principle that "anybody who works hard in America deserves a stable middle-class standard of living" while connecting progressive policies to working-class values.* Unlike some critics, Williams doesn't believe Democrats must abandon identity politics or progressive causes, but rather must present these causes in ways that connect with working-class values while prioritizing economic issues.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Described as having "something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is an award-winning scholar of social inequality. She is the author of White Working Class, and has published on class dynamics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic and more. She is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair (emerita) at University of California College of the Law San Francisco. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In this powerful and timely episode, we explore how feedback—especially public feedback—can have vastly different impacts depending on gender, and why the principle “praise publicly, criticize privately” is more than just good advice—it's a vital strategy for allyship, equity, and leadership development. Dr. Kimberly DeSimone shares personal insights from years of academic leadership, backed by compelling research on gender bias in student evaluations, performance reviews, and workplace feedback. This episode uncovers how even well-intentioned critiques can reinforce long-standing stereotypes and disproportionately affect women, particularly those in authority or leadership roles. From teaching evaluations to performance appraisals, listeners are challenged to think critically about how, where, and why they deliver feedback—and how they can shift their language and delivery to foster fairness, growth, and inclusion for everyone. In This Episode, You'll Learn: Why feedback given to women is often shaped by unconscious gender norms. How student evaluations and performance reviews can reflect systemic bias—even unintentionally. The power of public praise to combat stereotypes and normalize women's success. How private critique, delivered thoughtfully, fosters psychological safety and growth without reinforcing harmful narratives. The importance of avoiding gendered labels like “bossy,” “catty,” or “cold,” and replacing them with specific, behavior-based feedback. Why women are judged on proof while men are judged on potential—and how to interrupt that dynamic. Key Takeaways: Bias in feedback is real, often unconscious, and has lasting consequences. Words matter. The language we use to describe women influences how they are perceived and treated. Allyship means being intentional. Supporting women means rethinking when, where, and how we give feedback. Public criticism can reinforce negative stereotypes, while public praise can disrupt them. Everyone carries unconscious bias. But with awareness, we can shift the culture—one conversation, one evaluation, and one word choice at a time. Resources Mentioned: Clare Boothe Luce's quote on the burden of representation for women. Research by Joan Williams and the Center for WorkLife Law on gender bias. MacNell, Driscoll, and Hunt (2015) study on gender in teaching evaluations. Call to Action: Think about the last time you gave feedback—what words did you use? Was it public or private? This week, try praising a woman's work formally and publicly, and if needed, deliver critique privately and constructively. It's a small change with the potential for big impact.   Join the Conversation: Have a story about feedback—good or bad? Want to share how you're practicing mindful allyship? Tag us on Instagram @advancingwomenpodcast to keep the conversation going. Subscribe & Share: If this episode resonated with you, share it with a colleague or friend who gives or receives feedback. And don't forget to subscribe for more conversations on advancing women in leadership, work, and beyond.   For more information on Dr. DeSimone: https://www.instagram.com/advancingwomenpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/advancingwomenpodcast/ https://advancingwomenpodcast.com/

Michael is joined by Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair at University of California, in a chat about her book "White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America." Original air date 18 November 2019. The book was published on 16 May 2017.

In the U.S., we have laws and policies in place to prevent discrimination of Black workers. In addition, we have leaders who make public pledges in support of diversity goals. Yet the data continue to show that Black employees are less likely to be hired, more likely to stall out in mid-level positions, and stand little chance of gaining senior level positions. Why is that? Adia Harvey Winfield's work lies at the intersection of labor and race, and her research reveals that, for Black workers, there are gray areas. These gray areas are the cultural, social, and relational factors that influence who gets hired, who gets promoted, and who finds it easiest to navigate the workplace. That's what she writes about in her latest book, Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It. Adia shares powerful stories of Black workers across all kinds of professions and organizations. We're taken into the lived experiences of individual Black employees as they navigate landmines most of us don't even see. It's a book that took my understanding of racism in the workplace to a whole other level. Episode Links How Gray Areas in Work Culture Drive Racial Inequality What Do a Black Scientist, Non-Profit Executive, and Filmmaker Have in Common? They All Face Racism in the 'Gray Areas' of Workplace Culture We Built a Diverse Academic Department in 5 Years. Here's How. Joan Williams on Diversity Practices that Work The Team Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here. Support the Podcast If you like the show, please rate and review it on iTunes or wherever you subscribe, and tell a friend or family member about the show. Subscribe Click here and then scroll down to see a sample of sites where you can subscribe.

Show Notes: Cristina Hernandez, a graduate of Harvard Law School, shares her journey since graduating. She went to law school for three years and graduated in 1995 then went into private practice. After getting married and having two kids, she became a law firm partner in Wisconsin. Cristina decided to move to California and started working with Renee Meyers in 2012. She still practiced law, but she began working as a consultant on diversity, equity inclusion, and eventually became her VP handling all of her clients. Six years later, they were working with Netflix, where they started the Diversity, Equity Inclusion practice at Netflix. They worked at Netflix for four and a half years, and later became the chief diversity officer at Synopsis, a semiconductor company with 18,000 engineers and employees all around the world. Christina's journey has been marked by the rapid pace of change in her life and the world in which she works. She has experienced both personal and professional growth, and is now looking forward to continuing her journey in the legal profession.   Cristina explains what DEI means outside the U.S. and talks about the challenges of addressing diversity in the US, particularly in terms of gender, LGBTQ, and disability rights. She highlights that while efforts may work towards more women, African Americans, black, and Hispanic individuals, there are also other forms of diversity that exist globally. Gender oppression is a global issue, manifesting differently in different countries. Cristina highlights the importance of being curious, thinking critically, and being open to experiencing differences in various cultures. She shares an example from her time working with Netflix colleagues in Japan, where she had to listen hard and be humble about understanding gender differences playout in various workplaces. She talks about the global implications of Black Lives Matter and explains that colorism is a real issue worldwide, manifesting in different ways and affecting people of color, and how it is crucial to learn from each other's experiences. She also touches on the need to understand the complexity of different perspectives and work together with these differences. She mentions that caste oppression is another complex issue, with socio-economic differences playing out in almost every country differently. Disability rights are another area where companies like Microsoft have been pushing for improvements, but accessibility varies greatly around the world. Cristina emphasizes the importance of understanding and respecting diverse perspectives in order to work towards a more inclusive and equitable society. How to Integrate DEI in the Workplace Cristina offers background information on the DEI space and goes on to explore the adoption of DEI in the workplace. She explains that employee resource groups and bias training are important for creating fair workplaces, but they are not the only factors to consider. Companies need to invest in their systems and practices, as these are the sticky things that last for a long time. Companies often get involved in these efforts for defensive, curious, or customer-based reasons. Systems that impact people include hiring, development, promotion, and mentoring. She mentions Joan Williams, a professor at the University of California in San Francisco, who has written an amazing book about bias interrupters and various practices around hiring. Cristina emphasizes the importance of writing down evaluations to mitigate recency bias and ensure accurate recall. Onboarding and promotion processes should focus on understanding generational differences and taking down barriers to welcoming employees into teams. Development and promotion systems should be structured around development and selecting high potentials, and ensuring everyone gets access to mentorship. Cristina explains that sponsorship is vital for progression and can be either explicit or implicit. It involves leveraging personal capital to ensure success, but it cannot sponsor someone or move their career along. In terms of mentorship, Cristina identifies the difference between mentorship and sponsorship, and why one size does not fit all. She talks about the various different ways of making this work. Singing as an Opportunity to Transcend Division Cristina shares her lifelong passion for singing, which began with her father who was a choral conductor. She sang throughout her schooling and college. After moving to Los Angeles, she joined her husband's choir, which brings her joy and a sense of fulfillment. She now commutes to Silicon Valley three days a week, and she finds herself enjoying being with other people. Cristina also shares her experience of transcendence in choirs, where she feels a sense of unity and hope. Choirs are generally made up of people from different backgrounds, and the only thing used is their voice. This moment of transcendence is a testament to the power of human beings to come together and create something beautiful. She believes that this opportunity to transcend through art is sorely lacking in today's divided society. She takes this inspiration into her work, as it gives her hope and inspiration to be with people from different backgrounds making beautiful things. Cristina's passion for singing has been a significant part of her life. She believes that the opportunity to connect with others through music is a valuable skill that can help bridge the gap between individuals and create a more inclusive and meaningful world. Influential Courses and Professors at Harvard Cristina mentions Bernard Bailyn's class on Constitutional History and how it offered transformative debate and discourse in a different kind of way through the lens of history; she also loved Greg Nagy's The Ancient Greek Hero, and professor Julian Bond. Timestamps: 07:17 What DEI means outside of the U.S. 09:32 The definition of colorism 13:06 Caste division and disability inclusion 15:53 Business drivers that drive companies to hire a chief diversity officer 24:48 Systems and processes recommended to clients 26:09 How to mitigate recency bias 30:08 Formal mentoring programs and measuring success 36:61 The power of singing in a group CONTACT: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristina-hernandez-72b2811/ Email: cristina.hernandez.95@gmail.com  

On this episode of Crina and Kirsten Get to Work, our hosts reset the state of women at work after a restful and relaxing hiatus.     Joan Williams and her daughter Rachel Dempsey, wrote What Works for Women at Work.  Joan has decades of experience as a law professor and she runs a project focused primarily on women at work called Work Life Law at Hastings Law School.  Rachel is a journalist.   The authors have characterized womens' experiences at work into four patterns:   Prove it Again stems from assumptions about how women will behave at work.  This pattern looks like being penalized for mistakes that men make with little or no consequence; having to defend your decision or back it up with data, even if you are a seasoned professional; and the “stolen idea.”   The Tightrope stems for the precarious balance women are expected to strike between masculinity and femininity.  This pattern looks like being “too much” or “not enough”, being either a bitch or a doormat; and being pressed into traditionally feminine roles, such as taking notes.    The Maternal Wall stems from the strong negative competence and commitment associations triggered by motherhood and prescriptive bias (mothers should be at home). Joan and Rachel say “the ideal worker is expected to be unreservedly devoted to work, while the ideal mother is expected to invest similar levels of devotion to her children. As a result motherhood is perceived as incompatible with high levels of work effort.”  This pattern looks like not getting hired or promoted because of the assumptions others make about the obligations of motherhood.   The Tug of War stems from women working in what is a dysfunctional system.  Rather than supporting each other, we can pit ourselves against one another, we can also buy into male norms. Sometimes our different strategies to deal with a dysfunctional system pit us against each other.   Joan and Rachel remind us of a few important premises when we consider these four patterns: There is a stubborn gap at the top between men and women and their success at work A lot of what we are told at work is wrong Denial does not help - we cannot assume our excellence will save us from these experiences Everyone's a little bit sexist Know the rules, then break them - “there is no right way to be a woman”    The book is full of strategies to address the four patterns and a chapter on lessons learned from the research.    Joan's Work LIfe Law institute has developed what they refer to as bias interrupters, which are assessments and training to address the bias which is the root of the four patterns.  Check out Bias Interrupters on the Work Like Law website.   Joan and Rachel's book is a comprehensive look at women's experience at work.  They remind us what we experience is real, they help us to clearly define that experience and they provide excellent strategies, tools, lessons and stories for us to best manage that experience.  

Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers. In this essay, he focuses on Joan Williams and her novel Old Powder. After her first novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award, this one failed. Did her former lover William Faulkner have something to do with it? For much of the 60s, literary fiction remained a male preserve, Joan Williams looked like being the person to break that mould, then she disappeared. Why?

One World in a New World with Karen Pascal - Author, Entrepreneur, Life Coach & Podcast Host An Apocalyptic Chat with host, Zen Benefiel, MA, MBA, Transformational Coach (https://BeTheDream.com) Karen's jovial demeanor certainly adds to the sharing of her journey from Guyana to the U.S. Cultures are different and yet she responds similarly to many guests in the knowing and yet not knowing how. She recognized over time that her sensitivity was different than most, yet everyone has the ability to recognize subtle impressions. Her early inquiry began with the curiosity of what others were thinking. How do we deal with the varies voices we hear from time to time? Karen shares that at times the voices are in other languages and at times her inner sight revealed other life forms, too. Throughout this conversational exploration, she shares several instances where she paid and attention to the 'inner voice' and others where she did not. Listen in for your own insight. Her stories are perhaps typical and yet not. Moments of authentic and raw reflections will warm your heart. When queried about her learning of the functionality of her awareness and sensitivity she shares her internal process of learning to let go of the outcome, whether she heeded the voice or not. Karen reflects and reviews, apocalytically, how the advice from within was there, subtly, always. What situations have you found where 'something' offered a message so clear and so quietly? Karen shares her grandmother gave her wise advice when she was younger; don't be attached to anything. She found that this unattachment actually emerges from unconditional love. She feels we are lucky to be here and the importance of enjoying each moment with love and compassion allows freedom to experience more in life. Insights are sharred from a recent Friendship Bench, sponsored by BizCatalyst360, regarding the process of transformation being slow, like a snake shedding its skin slowly, or like a lobster that is quicker in changing yet has a greater vulnerability in doing so. Karen offers that the transcendence is going beyond ego, surrendering to the higher self or the natural connection we all have with creation. In the subtle world, does the outer world become a challenge or distraction to flow? Karen recounts some instances in Guyana where precarious situations became safer when she remained still inside and offered no attention to the outer event's temptation. The conversation goes deeper in exploring out-of-body experiences, which Karen describes in greater detail as Zen inquires further. Although the topics are serious, some pushing boundaries of understanding, Karen's authentic joy and openness is certainly refreshing. Karen and Zen discuss the congruency of science and spirituality in exploring the dynamics of inner sensitivity and relationships with self and others. She will surprise you with how easily she shares what most of us are recitent to do. Thanks for your attention and time. Please do subscribe and share our channel. We all need a chance to listen and reflect, growing in perspective and understanding of the diversity in life. Connect with Karen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-pascal-ceo-founder-of-mind-and-body-the-holistic-way-llc-73a901185/ Karen's Practice: https://heal.me/bestself Soul, Light and Body Podcast; cohost with Joan Williams: https://www.youtube.com/@soullightandbody _________ Connect with Zen: https://linkedin.com/zenbenefiel Zen's web: https://zenbenefiel.com Live and Let Live Global Peace Movement: https://liveandletlive.org

In this episode, Prof. Joan Williams of the University of California, Hastings, speaks about her new initiative: The Diploma Divide, arguing that Americans must grapple with the realities of economic class differences and their political impacts.

The North Gwinnett Kiwanis Club hosted it’s Annual Golf Classic at Chateau Elan Golf Club in Braselton, GA on September 13, 2022. For the third year in a row, all proceeds benefitted the Home of Hope at Gwinnett Children’s Shelter. The presenting sponsor was Homestar Keith Howell Team. Business RadioX was on site broadcasting live […]

The North Gwinnett Kiwanis Club hosted it’s Annual Golf Classic at Chateau Elan Golf Club in Braselton, GA on September 13, 2022. For the third year in a row, all proceeds benefitted the Home of Hope at Gwinnett Children’s Shelter. The presenting sponsor was Homestar Keith Howell Team. Business RadioX was on site broadcasting live […] The post North Gwinnett Kiwanis Club Annual Golf Classic benefitting Home of Hope Children’s Shelter appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

For the first time in U.S. history, we have employees from five different generations working side by side. With so many different perspectives and life experiences, conflict is inevitable. Unfortunately, this often leads to stereotyping. We classify colleagues as millennial snowflakes, entitled young people, or clueless boomers. When this happens, we miss out on some of the greatest business opportunities of the twenty-first century. Opportunities to build better products and services informed by a diverse mix of views. Chances to develop better learning experiences where we cross pollinate different generational strengths. Fortunately, Megan Gerhardt's written a book to help us navigate the shark-filled waters of multi-generational management. It's called, Gentelligence: The Revolutionary Approach to Leading an Intergenerational Workforce. In it, she shares the hallmarks of each generation, including what motivates and worries them. She also shares insightful ways to lead and build rapport. It's a resource you'll return to again and again. Episode Links Protecting My Turf: The Moderating Role of Generational Differences on the Relationships between Self-direction and Hedonism Values and Reactions to Generational Diversity An Exploratory Study of Gender and Motivation to Lead in Millennials Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence Bias Interrupted by Joan Williams and her interview on Curious Minds at Work Leaders Who Coach by Jan Salisbury The Team Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here. Support the Podcast If you like the show, please rate and review it on iTunes or wherever you subscribe, and tell a friend or family member about the show. Subscribe Click here and then scroll down to see a sample of sites where you can subscribe.

Imagine that fewer people are buying your organization's product or service. It's a shift you didn't anticipate. To fix it, you study the data, identify the problem, and then take steps to address it. Your plan may include changes in marketing or team incentives. What it won't include is doing nothing or trying to turn things around with one grand gesture. Yet that's how we often approach meeting diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. Joan Williams is author of the book, Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good. She's a Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, where she directs the Center for WorkLife. For decades, she's studied structural inequality in the workplace. What she's learned is that the most successful organizations treat diversity as a business goal. I wanted to interview Joan because she offers a fresh perspective on the topic. Through her work, she's identified the most common ways bias shows up in organizations. She's also figured out how to make bias training more effective. Finally, she's learned which question to ask to determine an organization's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. After listening to this interview, I guarantee you'll walk away with lots of new insights. Episode Links Bias Interrupters Why Companies Should Add Class to Their Diversity Discussions A Winning Parental Leave Policy Can Be Surprisingly Simple How One Company Worked to Root Out Bias from Performance Reviews Data-Driven Diversity Implicit Association Test Class Advantage, Commitment Penalty: The Gendered Effects of Social Class Signals in an Elite Labor Market The Maternal Wall Matrix by Lauren Groff  The Team Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here. Support the Podcast If you like the show, please rate and review it on iTunes or wherever you subscribe, and tell a friend or family member about the show. Subscribe Click here and then scroll down to see a sample of sites where you can subscribe.

It's hard out there for working parents--especially for working mothers. Mary Abbajay and Chris DeSantis tackle listeners' questions about balancing the duties of parenthood with career goals. "Bundle of Nerves" wants to know when the right time is to tell her boss that she is pregnant. "Kid Proof" is annoyed that their boss' kid is constantly derailing team meetings. "Mom's the Word" struggles with the uneven playing field at work between working mothers and working fathers. Chris DeSantis recommends these books to help working parents:Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family by Anne Marie SlaughterWhat Works for Women at Work by Joan Williams and Rachel Dempsey.  What Works, Gender Equality by Design by Iris BonnetForget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor by Sylvia Hewlett.If you have workplace dilemmas or career questions, send them to us! Email us: info@cubicleconfidential.com or tweet us: @cubicleconfide1. All names will be changed to protect the guilty and innocent...

Joan C. Williams talks about stopping bias transmission to create inclusion for real and for good.

Innovation. Transformational leadership. Joan Williams, Associate Vice President for Diversity and Chief Diversity Officer at Salisbury University talks about these  important subjects and how we can bring about change. She also lays out the landscape for diversity education development and facilitation. Don't miss this open, transparent and informed conversation.  Find all episodes on my website: Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or my website: Dr. Pat Sanders Support this podcast on Buy Me a Coffee  You are appreciated! Please leave a positive review. Email me at hellodrpat@gmail.com    

Should feminists be pro-life? Should conservatives support more welfare for families? Who is Mary Wollstonecraft? What did RBG get right and wrong? I dug into these questions with my guest today, the legal scholar Erika Bachiochi. Our discussion centers on Erika's new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, which argues for a form of feminism that takes into account natural differences between men and women, especially in what she calls “reproductive asymmetry” i.e. that having sex and having children carry different implications for men and women. We talk about her journey from a Bernie Sanders supporting kind of feminist to a Roman Catholic kind of feminist, including a strong pro-life moral basis. Her intellectual heroine is the 18th century thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, who had a feminist vision that was about the equal pursuit of the good, which Erika John Stuart Mill's feminism based on a perfect equality.  We talk about what Ruth Bader Ginsburg got right and wrong, whether conservatives should be supporting President Biden's big pro-family welfare expansions, the Texas abortion law, family-friendly policy, and much more.  I should say that at the very beginning Erika candidly describes her troubled childhood and early adulthood, which in her darkest hours ever led her to thoughts of suicide. Erika Bachiochi  Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar specializing in Equal Protection jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, Catholic social teaching, and sexual ethics. She studied at Middlebury College and got her law degree from Boston University. Erika is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, where she directs the Wollstonecraft Project. She lives in Boston with her husband and seven children.  More Bachiochi  Bachiochi's new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, is a thoughtful and provocative read.  Her previous article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, titled Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights, served as a basis for her book.  Bachiochi has also written a few op-eds for Newsweek Follow her work on twitter: @erikabachiochi Also mentioned  Bachiochi quited Mill in On Liberty: “misplaced notions of liberty prevent moral obligations on the part of parents from being recognized, and legal obligations from being imposed” She also quoted Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: “A truly benevolent legislator always endeavours to make it the interest of each individual to be virtuous; and thus private virtue becoming the cement of public happiness, an orderly whole is consolidated by the tendency of all the parts towards a common center”  We referenced my work on the economic and social status of American women.  We discussed the work of my colleague, Isabel Sawhill, and her book Generation Unbound  I referenced Scott Winship's work on the dynamics of marriage and childrearing  Bachiochi spoke about Mary Ann Glendon, a leading thinker in this space and a professor at Harvard Law.  She also referenced Joan Williams' op-ed in the New York Times, titled The Case for Accepting Defeat on Roe.  I quoted Margaret Mead who wrote, “We won't get equality between groups by ignoring the differences between them.”  Earlier this summer, Josh Hawley tweeted that he was against including women in the draft because he didn't want to “force [service] upon our daughters, sisters, and wives.” We mentioned Heather Boushey who currently serves on the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and her work on family policy, for example in her Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict (2016). The Mary Wollstonecraft twitter account I referred to seems to have gone quiet lately. As an alternative. As a replacement may I suggest: https://twitter.com/womenpostingws.  The Dialogues Team Creator: Richard Reeves Research: Ashleigh Maciolek Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)

Prof. Joan Williams of UC Hastings discusses her book "The White Working Class - Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America" with Forum Fellow Nicolas Wittstock. In the book, Williams argues that arrogance and inability to understand the lives of working class Americans on the part of well-educated Liberal elites, is driving working class Americans towards rightwing Populists. This podcast is produced by Matthew Dagele, Morgan Wack, and Nicolas Wittstock. Our theme music was created by Ted Long. Any questions or feedback, please contact uwpoliticaleconomy@gmail.com

In our “Race and Community Esteem series”, guests who have ranged from leaders in their community to individuals sharing stories of transformation; from life choices that divide us, to shifting to consciously creating a life that connects us in our shared humanity. And in the discourse out in the world, media, news, social media, LANGUAGE is bandied about with very little thought about what those words really mean. Diversity is one of those words. INCLUSION is another. Today we have JOAN WILLIAMS joining us from Salisbury University. Universities today, depending on where they are and what their leadership is like, can be a place of great change and innovation or they can be a hotbed of racism and ignorance. What is the role of a university today, in educating not only the students and future leaders, but also educating us the community? All music and lyrics in this episode by James Harrell and Ilyana Kadushin

Joan is a Distinguished Professor of Law and the Hastings Foundation Chair at the University of California, Hastings College of Law. She is the author of numerous books, including the much acclaimed White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Described as having "something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan has played a central role in reshaping the conversation about work, gender, and class over the past quarter century. [RECORDING DATE: April 8, 2021] If you find value in these conversations, please consider joining the THINK FOR YOURSELF community.  All supporters are invited to participate in the live conversations and are given an opportunity to interact with my guests.  More information is available at www.patreon.com/mansharamani

Another episode of "Talk Jamaican". In this episode I highlight the explosion of the volcano in St. Vincent and introduce listener's to Jamaica's extinct volcano at Black Hill in the parish of Portland. Ref:(78) Joan Williams, author - YouTube

Today, we welcome back Professor Joan Williams, founder of the Center for WorkLife Law, to discuss the impacts of the pandemic on working mothers and caregivers and what has happened since our original conversation.

The Democrats' working class problem. Plus, How corporate monopolies have changed our lives. And Bill Press on the right wing media Trump is watching now.   Joan Williams says Democrats still have to figure out how to connect with the working class.  David Dayen says it's time for a grassroots movement to challenge monopolies. Plus Bill Press speaks with Matt Gertz about the shifting landscape of right wing media.   Joan C. Williams Joan C. Williams has written extensively about America’s working class.  And she says it’s a world that Democrats still have to understand.   David Dayen David Dayen’s most recent book explores the power of concentrated economic power on daily life.  He says monopolies pervade almost every aspect of our lives, often when we don’t even know it.   Matt Gertz The right wing media networks that are worse than Fox, and why Trump is a fan.  Bill Press with Matt Gertz, Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America. If you'd like to hear the entire interview, visit BillPressPods.com.   Jim Hightower What America can learn from the Animal kingdom.

It's not often that you get two superheroes with the same name. But when it comes to The Flash, they just can't stop at one. We cover the first appearance of both Jay Garrick and Barry Allen. Do you have a story arc you'd like us to cover? Send us your ideas. Twitter: @comicrundown Instagram: @comicbookrundown Email: comicbookrundown@gmail.com Hosted by Joe Janero and Ron Hanes Edited by Joe Janero Theme song provided by one of the Sex Turtles (Joe Cubas) Find our t-shirt at https://www.redbubble.com/shop/comic+book+rundown?ref=search_box

Joan C. Williams is a Distinguished Professor of Law, Hastings Foundation Chair, and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings Law. Joan has played a central role in reshaping the conversation about work, gender, and class over the past quarter century, and her path-breaking work helped create the field of work-family studies and modern workplace flexibility policies. She’s one of the 10 most cited scholars in her field and has written 11 books, including the influential What Works for Women at Work in 2014 and more recently, White Working Class in 2017. Her awards include the Families and Work Institute’s Work Life Legacy Award (2014), the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award (2012), and the ABA’s Margaret Brent Women Award for Lawyers of Achievement (2006). Her Harvard Business Review article, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class” has been read over 3.7 million times and is now the most read article in HBR’s 90-plus year history.In this episode, Stew and Joan talk about how class, in addition to race and gender, produces dividing lines that result in polarization and alienation. Joan describes and illustrates an evidence-based method for interrupting biases that reinforce systems of oppression in society and at work. They talk about prospects for change in the upcoming Biden-Harris administration, the awful impact of the pandemic on women’s lives and careers, women’s reproductive rights, and more.Here then is an invitation, a challenge, for you, once you’ve listened to the conversation. Check out Bias Interrupters and take the quick survey then develop an idea for action based on your results. Share your ideas, and your reactions to this episode, by writing to Stew friedman@wharton.upenn.edu or via LinkedIn. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Are you stunned by the rise of populist, nationalist movements, wondering why so many would seemingly vote against their own economic interests, or simply feeling like a stranger in your own country? As we approach election day in November, how can we connect with a crucial set of workers –and voters? How can we bridge the differences in gender, class, race and work?    Join us to hear from Joan Williams, described as having “something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times, in conversation with Dean Malcolm Clemens Young about her central role in reshaping the conversation about work, gender and class — and why we won't fix US politics until we talk about class. 

The Home of Hope Fall Classic Golf Tournament was held on September 15, 2020 at the Lanier Islands Legacy Golf Course. For more than two decades, the Kiwanis Club of North Gwinnett has been organizing golf fundraisers for various kid-based community projects. In 2020, for the first time, the organization teamed up with the Home […] The post Home of Hope Fall Classic Golf Tournament appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

Welcome to part 2 of a 2-part interview with Mrs. Joan Williams.  Last week, in part 1, Joan shared her…

Welcome to part 2 of a 2-part interview with Mrs. Joan Williams.  Last week, in part 1, Joan shared her…

Join me in a conversation with Mrs. Joan Williams, MS. Joan is a professional in the insurance industry, a wife,…

Join me in a conversation with Mrs. Joan Williams, MS. Joan is a professional in the insurance industry, a wife,…

Schools and offices are operating remotely for the first time in history. Is it working? Today, we speak with Professor Joan Williams about the pandemic and the implications for telework. Professor Williams has played a central role in reshaping the conversation about work, gender, and class over the past quarter-century. She has authored 11 books and over 90 academic articles. Most recently, she appeared in a New York Times article on “Three Things Lockdowns Have Exposed About Working and Parenting.”

Kindred’s editor, Lisa Reagan, attended the University of California at Hastings’ Center for Worklife Law‘s Breastfeeding Policy Summit at Jones Day Law Firm in San Francisco on August 6, 2019. The summit’s purpose was to educate an invited group of activists from around the country on the insights gleaned from Joan Williams’ quarter century research into advancing women in the workplace, as well as the center’s new reports on discrimination against breastfeeding and pregnant mothers in the workplace. The summit trained activists in choosing politically-conscientious verbiage, becoming aware of values of their legislators and region, and using these insights to help create and pass legislation to promote and protect women’s reproductive rights in the workplace. Joan C. Williams is a Distinguished Law Professor and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings. Her path-breaking work helped create modern workplace flexibility policies and the field of work-family studies. She has authored over 90 academic articles and 11 books, including White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America and What Works for Women at Work. One of her proudest accomplishments was winning the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award in high school. READ THE TRANSCRIPT: https://www.kindredmedia.org/2020/01/class-conflict-breastfeeding-policy-and-creating-systemic-change%EF%BB%BF-an-interview-with-joan-c-williams/

In this special edition, we are featuring interviews with Regional Centers and projects from all over the US to discover their impacts & insights on COVID-19. Special thanks to those that participated (in order of appearance): 1. Noreen Hogan of CMB 2. Glenn La Mattina of NRIA 3. Steve Strinisa of Cleveland International Fund 4. Joan Williams of Watercrest 5. Umesh Harigopal of PropMix 6. Doug Anderson of Pacific Group 7. Devin Williams of EB-5 Global 8. Sebastian Stubbe of Pine State-Economic development corporation 9. Sushanth Reddy Charabuddi of Eagle I Property Group 10. Rich Marquard of Live in America/ LCP Group 11. Henry Lieberman of American Life 12. George Xu of Century Development Group 13. Dan Healy of Civitas Have a topic or question you would like covered on a future episode of EB-5 Investment Voice? Let us know over at http://mshahlaw.com/contact-us/ or using the contact details below. Phone: 212-233-7473 Email: info@mshahlaw.com To discover the show notes on this episode as well as other topics, information, and resources; please head over to http://www.MShahLaw.com/Podcasts

Bonni Stachowiak: Teaching in Higher Ed Bonni Stachowiak is the host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, a professor of business and management at Vanguard University, and my life partner. Prior to her academic career, Bonni was a human resources consultant and executive officer for a publicly traded company. She is the author of The Productive Online and Offline Professor: A Practical Guide*. Listener Questions Toni asked about the best way to deal with people who don’t want to grow. Russ wanted our opinion on the best way to interview potential new hires. Sami wondering about the best way to utilize personality assessments. Laura asked our opinion on taking a step back in compensation for a job position she really wants. Resources Mentioned StrengthsFinder training for individuals and teams* (use code CFL10 for a 10% tuition discount) How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias on Their Teams by Joan Williams and Sky Mihaylo Related Episodes How to Get the Ideal Team Player, with Patrick Lencioni (episode 301) How to Challenge Directly and Care Personally, with Kim Scott (episode 302) Get Smart About Assessments, with Ken Nowack (episode 371) How to Motivate Leaders, with John Maxwell (episode 452) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic.

Bonni Stachowiak: Teaching in Higher Ed Bonni Stachowiak is the host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, a professor of business and management at Vanguard University, and my life partner. Prior to her academic career, Bonni was a human resources consultant and executive officer for a publicly traded company. She is the author of The Productive Online and Offline Professor: A Practical Guide*. Listener Questions Toni asked about the best way to deal with people who don’t want to grow. Russ wanted our opinion on the best way to interview potential new hires. Sami wondering about the best way to utilize personality assessments. Laura asked our opinion on taking a step back in compensation for a job position she really wants. Resources Mentioned StrengthsFinder training for individuals and teams* (use code CFL10 for a 10% tuition discount) How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias on Their Teams by Joan Williams and Sky Mihaylo Related Episodes How to Get the Ideal Team Player, with Patrick Lencioni (episode 301) How to Challenge Directly and Care Personally, with Kim Scott (episode 302) Get Smart About Assessments, with Ken Nowack (episode 371) How to Motivate Leaders, with John Maxwell (episode 452) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic.

Joan Williams, professor and the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, says that it's extremely difficult for organizations to rid their workforces of the unconscious biases that can prevent women and minorities from advancing. But it's not so hard for individual managers to interrupt bias within their own teams. She offers specific suggestions for how bosses can shift their approach in four areas: hiring, meetings, assignments, and reviews/promotions. Leaders who employ these practices, she argues, are able to embrace and reap the advantages of diversity, even in the absence of larger organizational directives. Williams is the author of the HBR article "How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias on Their Teams."

This episode is a must listen for every career maven. Michelle Wimes - Chief Diversity & Professional Development Officer brings it to you straight with grace and love. A natural teacher, Michelle brings soulful wisdom that will teach anyone listening. Starting from studying Spain to studying people, Michelle’s episode highlights the value in following your passion, building authentic relationships and living and working by faith. She gives concrete advice for women, especially women of color desiring to rise in the corporate workspace. The book she recommended is “What works for women at work” by Joan Williams. Read more about her below. Michelle P. Wimes serves as the Chief Diversity and Professional Development Officer at Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, P.C., one of the nation’s largest labor and employment law firms. Michelle has extensive experience in delivering strategic leadership, client development, and talent management programming. Prior to a career in law, Michelle was an elementary and middle school teacher in Kansas City. She received a B.A. from the University of Missouri and performed graduate work at the University of Seville in Spain and undergraduate work at the University of Xalapa in Veracruz, Mexico. Due to her studies and her extensive legal work in Latin America, she is fluent in Spanish. Michelle earned her law degree, with trial advocacy honors, from Tulane Law School. She is the proud wife of federal district court judge Brian C. Wimes and the mother of three daughters, Sydney, Gabrielle, and Saige.

Do women in STEM have to prove themselves more than men do? Are office politics more complicated for women than men? How does motherhood affect women engineers? In this SWE Diverse episode with WE19 Mega Session speaker Joan Williams, we'll address some of those gender bias issues and how to navigate them in the workplace.

Brooke Thomas speaks with Nse Ufot and Joan Williams on The Conversation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While an unpredictable schedule has always been a part of a restaurant worker’s experience, the advent of scheduling technology and the pressure to keep labor costs low has turned the schedules - and lives - of restaurant and retail workers upside down. We hear stories of waitstaff and big box retail workers from around the country. Joan Williams, Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings, shares research on how predictable schedules not only make life better and healthier for workers, but actually makes businesses more profitable. This episode is brought to you by Constant Contact. For a free trial, sign up today at constantcontact.com/lifelab.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While an unpredictable schedule has always been a part of a restaurant worker’s experience, the advent of scheduling technology and the pressure to keep labor costs low has turned the schedules - and lives - of restaurant and retail workers upside down. We hear stories of waitstaff and big box retail workers from around the country. Joan Williams, Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings, shares research on how predictable schedules not only make life better and healthier for workers, but actually makes businesses more profitable.

Americans may have thought that we discarded a class system when we threw a tea party in Boston many years back.  If we did, Joan Williams is here to report–it's back. And much of it revolves around the fact that our self image as a country with a large and growing middle class, with steady … Continue reading EP 226 The White Working Class In America

A friend emailed me JOAN WILLIAMS’ Harvard Business Review article, What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class. Read over 3.7 million times, it’s the most read article in HBR’s 90-plus year history, and I can see why. WILLIAMS is the author of WHITE WORKING CLASS: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. “If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, the consequences could turn dangerous.”

In this episode I am excited to have Joan Williams on to talk about gender and race, and how they play out in the workplace through her new "Bias at Work" survey. Joan is a Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings. Her path-breaking work helped create the field of work-family studies and modern workplace flexibility policies. She has been studying the legal profession and how to improve it for decades.   Topics Covered She defines implicit bias and examples of the four basic ways they can show up at work: Prove It Again, Tightrope, Maternal Wall, and Tug of War. Why WorkLife Law created the "Bias at Work" survey, and it's goal. How the types of subtle bias that are captured in the "Bias at Work" survey affect lawyers. What law firms and legal organizations can do to stop these subtle biases from affecting their employees.   Learn more about Joan at: Bias Interrupters | Small Steps, Big Change     Questions? Comments? Email Jeena! hello@jeenacho.com. You can also connect with Jeena on Twitter: @Jeena_Cho For more information, visit: jeenacho.com Order The Anxious Lawyer book — Available in hardcover, Kindle and Audible Find Your Ease: Retreat for Lawyers I'm creating a retreat that will provide a perfect gift of relaxation and rejuvenation with an intimate group of lawyers. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/VXfIXq MINDFUL PAUSE: Bite-Sized Practices for Cultivating More Joy and Focus 31-day program. Spend just 6 minutes every day to practice mindfulness and meditation. Decrease stress/anxiety, increase focus and concentration. Interested? http://jeenacho.com/mindful-pause/ Transcript Joan Williams: [00:00:00] Implicit bias is a technical term that I use because most people know it, it implies that the bias that's going around is unconscious and subtle. And I think actually that's quite misleading, I think a lot of it is pretty blatant. And I frankly don't think it's that important, whether the person who's engaged in biased behavior chooses to bring that to their consciousness or not. Intro: [00:00:27] Welcome to The Resilient Lawyer podcast. In this podcast, we have meaningful, in-depth conversations with lawyers, entrepreneurs, and change agents. We offer tools and strategies for creating a more joyful and satisfying life. And now your host, Jeena Cho. Jeena Cho: [00:00:47] Hello my friends, thanks for being with me today. In this episode, I have Joan Williams. She is a Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings. Her path-breaking work helped create the field of work-family studies and modern workplace flexibility policies. She has been studying the legal profession and how to improve it for decades. Joan welcome to the show, I'm so happy to have you. Joan Williams: [00:01:19] I'm delighted to be here, thanks for inviting me. Jeena Cho: [00:01:22] So can you give us a quick 30-second introduction of who you are and what you do? Joan Williams: [00:01:29] I've been a law professor for a very long time, and I've been studying gender for a very long time. I started out studying work-family issues, and now my chief focus is on gender and race in the workplace, and how they play out in subtle ways. Which is why we're excited about our new "Bias at Work" survey that allows people to go in and answer a few questions, and get a quick readout of what kind of bias climate they are reporting at work. Jeena Cho: [00:02:00] And what have you been finding, in terms of bias at work so far? Joan Williams: [00:02:05] Well, the "Bias at Work" survey is part of a larger survey that we've used on that, to assess the bias climate first in engineering, and more recently in the legal profession. I co-wrote a study for the ABA Commission on Women in the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, where we gave the larger survey to a national sample of lawyers, and we're just about to come out with the results. Bottom line is, there's a lot of implicit bias going around. Jeena Cho: [00:02:42] To start off, I think that term implicit bias gets kind of tossed around a lot. What do you mean when you say implicit bias? Joan Williams: [00:02:50] There is really just a lot of gender and racial bias, in addition to bias based on other personal characteristics. Implicit bias is a technical term that I use because most people know it. It implies that the bias that's going around is unconscious and subtle, and I think actually that's quite misleading. I think a lot of it is pretty blatant, and I frankly don't think it's that important whether the person who's engaged in biased behavior chooses to bring that to their consciousness or not. I always say, if you're clueless whose fault is that? Jeena Cho: [00:03:32] What are some examples of how these implicit biases show up at work? Joan Williams: [00:03:38] Well there are four basic types. The first, I call "prove it again." And it's that some people find they need to prove themselves more so than their colleagues. And it's definitely triggered by race, it's triggered by gender, it's triggered by class origin in professions like the legal profession. People who were born in non-elite backgrounds have to prove themselves more than people from elite families. It's also triggered by disability, so that's proved again. The second is quite different, it's called "the tightrope." It stems from research on women that shows that a narrower range of behavior is accepted from women. So women often have to choose between being liked but not respected, or respected but not liked. And when they're assertive they're called aggressive, or worse. Anger is less accepted, self-promotion is less accepted from women than from men. And our research with things like the "Bias at Work" survey shows that a narrower range of behavior is accepted not only by gender, but also by race. So it affects people of color, men as well as women. For example, anger is less likely to be accepted in a professional workplace when it comes from an African-American. Jeena Cho: [00:05:19] Yeah. Joan Williams: [00:05:21] And the third pattern of bias is actually the strongest, it's called "the maternal wall"; its gender bias triggered by motherhood. It affects dads too, if they play an active role in family care. And then the final one is called "the tug of war," and that's when gender or racial bias turns into a conflict within those groups. Jeena Cho: [00:05:46] You know, these issues just seem so big. And so often people aren't aware of it, or you may not be aware that you're treating someone that's a woman or a person of color differently than you do someone who's a white male or looks like you. So how do we begin to become aware of it, and change these behaviors? Joan Williams: [00:06:14] Well actually people are in luck because they can go to our website, which is www.biasinterrupters.org, and we have a full set of open-sourced toolkits for interrupting bias based on a bias in performance evaluations, in hiring, in meetings, and in assignments. And just going to the website and using the tools for individuals will help give you a very abrupt (and we hope efficient) education on how these patterns of bias commonly play out in the legal profession, and how it interrupt it. Jeena Cho: [00:07:01] I love that, I love that there's a toolkit and people can just go there and look at it. I often feel like, especially being a woman of color and in the legal profession, I always felt like there was so much focus on changing me, or changing us and our behavior. I remember going to these workshops on how to handle interruptions, or how to handle when someone else claims your idea as their own. So how much of this work needs to be done by the people that these behavior's impact, so women and people of color, versus white males? Joan Williams: [00:07:49] Yeah. And I think it's important to point out that for some of these patterns, specifically proven again, white men from non-elite backgrounds may be having the same kinds of problems that women and people of color are having. [00:08:06] I mean we've been working on these problems and supposedly deeply caring about diversity in the legal profession for 20 or 30 years, and almost nothing has happened. When I gave my first program on women in the legal profession in 1997, 17% of a law firm's partners were women. Do you know what it is today, for equity partners? Jeena Cho: [00:08:33] Oh I look at the data, yeah. Joan Williams: [00:08:35] It's, oh my gosh. So what we've been doing hasn't been working, and that's chiefly because the chief tools have been diversity initiatives or women's initiatives. And as you point out, that's totally great if the problem is with the women and people of color, but typically that's not the problem. The problem is that these forms of bias have been constantly transmitted through an organization's basic business systems, which is why the other set of toolkits on that Bias Interrupters web page are tools for organizations, tweaks they can make to their hiring or performance evaluations, systems that will in an evidence-based, metrics-driven way, interrupt this constant transmission of bias through basic business systems and workplace interactions. Jeena Cho: [00:09:33] So for the listeners that are out there that are like, yeah maybe I have some biases and I want to figure out a way to interrupt it, can you give one or two concrete examples or suggestions on how they can change their behavior? Joan Williams: [00:09:54] I actually wrote a whole book on that with my daughter Rachel Dempsey, it's called "What Works for Women at Work." And what I did for that book is just went around to the savviest women I could find, recited the common patterns of gender bias, and said any of that sound familiar? 96% said yes. And what's worked for you? Then that's what works for women at work. And I'll give you some examples. You mentioned the stolen idea, when you mention an idea and someone else gets credit for it. Well the next time that happens, you can do several different things. One is you can just say really mildly or with humor, "So glad you liked that idea, here's the next step." Or you can work behind the scenes if, that happens persistently, and set up a little posse of people who either echo each other's ideas, making it clear who the idea came from. Or when someone steals an idea, they can say, "I'm so glad you like Jenna's idea. I think you've added something important Jim, here's the next step." So what we have and what we gathered in what works for women at work were a lot of low-risk strategies for interrupting bias (on your own or on behalf of others) without spending too much political capital. Jeena Cho: [00:11:32] Yeah, I love that suggestion. What can law firms or legal organizations do to stop these subtle or implicit biases from affecting their employees? Joan Williams: [00:11:44] Well lucky them, because within the month or very early next month will be released a new report that we did for the ABA Commission on Women and Minority Corporate Counsel Association. It's called "You Can't Stop What You Can't See," and it has not only the results of our national survey on racial and gender bias in the legal profession, but also a full set of open source toolkits specifically designed for law firm lawyers and in-house counsel. So they're going to have to toolkits very specifically designed for those environments that will allow them to find out if they have bias through the workplace experiences survey, and then interrupt the biases if they do. I'll give you an example on the issue of assignments, because that's been less talked about. In "What Works for Women at Work," my daughter Rachel Dempsey coined the term "the office housework," and that women do a lot more of the office housework than men. The undervalued work, the literal housework like planning parties, and administrative work like finding a time or place to meet. So one of the toolkits that we have is a toolkit that provides a protocol for an individual manager or department or a whole organization, to find out if there is a fair allocation of the glamour work on one hand, and the office housework on the other. And then to establish a very specific protocol for remedying both problems. If you have nothing but women doing the office housework, there's a protocol for spreading that around more evenly. And if you have nothing but a small group of white men getting the glamour work, there's a step-by-step protocol for remedying that problem. Jeena Cho: [00:13:56] Yeah, I love that. And I think that's something that happens all the time in offices. I remember being given instructions like, don't sit next to the food because you don't want to be responsible for serving the food, and all of these rules that you to keep in your head for just trying to navigate the law firm environment, so you don't end up as the office housewife. Joan Williams: [00:14:19] Yeah, and the bottom line is that takes up brain space, and it has the potential of undercutting women's credibility. Asian American women are under more pressure than any other group of women to behave in feminine ways, and face often more pushback if they don't. And the bottom line is that that shouldn't be your job, to constantly be heading off bias at the pass. That is really the organization's job, to put in systems that seamlessly interrupt those common patterns of bias. Jeena Cho: [00:14:58] Sometimes when I have these conversations I get pushback, and the pushback is why should we treat the women or the people of color special? Why do they get their own retreat, for example, at a law firm? Why do they get their own woman lawyer meetings or groups? And that's somehow biased against the white males. I'm curious what your response is to that? Joan Williams: [00:15:29] We are already treating the women and people of color differently. The nationwide study of engineers found that if you ask American engineers if they feel like they have to prove themselves more than their colleagues, it's true that 1/3 of white men say yes, but 2/3's of women and 2/3's of people of color say yes. So those women's and diversity initiatives are designed, at best, to help women and people of color navigate problems that they face, in that case twice as often as white men. Jeena Cho: [00:16:15] The other place where I often notice is very glaringly, because I spend so much time traveling around the country and speaking, is so many legal conferences. I can probably randomly pick any legal conference (unless it's being put on by a woman's organization or an Asian Bar Association or the Minority Bar Association) and there is not a whole lot of diversity in the pool of the speakers. And often when I point this out to the organizers and say, "Hey you have 80 speakers and you literally had six women and one person of color, me. That's a problem." They will come back and say something like, well we care about diversity but we're not going to sacrifice quality to have diversity, and we just picked the most qualified speaker. What's your response to that? Joan Williams: [00:17:16] You know, it kind of depends on the field. Some fields are very small and they have a certain demography. If that's true, then you should be thinking about what fields are represented at your conference. But most fields in the law are large and diverse, and probably what's happening is.. I remember going into the Dean when I was at Harvard Law School and asking why there was one woman on the faculty as a tenured woman. And he batted his eyelashes at me, bless his heart, and said there's none qualified. And I said, in the whole country? And he said no. So that is a failure of imagination and it's a failure of social networks. Because how do people put together conferences? They're putting them together under time pressure, they go through their networks, and the single strongest determinant of who is in your network is who's similar to you. So they need to either diversify their network, that would be a good idea, or make sure that the planning committee represents diversified networks by adding other people to the planning committee whose networks will help them tap the full pool of talent. Jeena Cho: [00:18:52] Yeah, and also the other thing I often notice is the planning committee will be let's say 10 people, 9 of them will be white males and they'll have one woman or one person of color, and they'll literally tell me, "Well she was responsible for finding us diverse speakers, and she didn't." And I always feel like no, it can't be up to one person within an organization or within a conference planning committee to fix your diversity problem. And I think so often that happens, like in law firms we have people that are Director of Diversity and Inclusion, and that person gets scapegoated if you fail on the diversity and inclusion front. Joan Williams: [00:19:34] That's not called caring about diversity, that's called not caring about diversity. One of the problems and reasons there's been so little progress is that again, the organizational response to the failure to retain and advance women and people of color often has been to hire somebody as a Diversity and Inclusion manager, and give them a budget for programming. Well the reason that women and people of color are falling out of the pipeline is because they have to prove themselves more than the white guys from elite backgrounds, a narrower range of behavior is accepted from the women and people of color, they're under a lot of pressure to play back office roles, they're not given equal access to the glamour work. For women, motherhood is often used as an excuse to sideline women, and the ideal worker still is designed around a man married to a homemaker. Those are not problems that you can solve by hiring a D&I manager and giving her a budget. That response is again showing that you don't care as an organization. Jeena Cho: [00:20:59] Hmm. You just made this point a little while ago, but we do tend to hang out and associate with people that are like us; I think that's sort of a human nature. So if you look around your network and your circle of friends and colleagues and you notice, they all look like me, they went to the same law school. If you're a white male, it's like oh yeah so many people that I work with are white males and they all went to the same law school that I went to. Thoughts or suggestions on how to expand your network? Even just opening your mind to different ideas. I think it's sometimes harder and uncomfortable to try to reach out and make connections. You know, how to be with that discomfort and start to make those positive changes in your life? Joan Williams: [00:21:58] I think it's particularly hard for women, I think it's particularly hard for Asian Americans. It's hard for women because the default model of friendship differs by gender. For women, the default model of friendship is to be a good friend you're very open, you have a deep emotional connection, you share troubles. The default model of friendships among the bros is that you have a broad network of relatively shallow ties, and the fact that you're going to help each other's careers is kind of a given. Whereas, if a woman tries to, for example, get business from a friend, it may be seen as, "Oh my gosh I thought we were talking about emotional issues and having an emotional connection." And that context, particularly for women in law firms who really have to take steps towards rainmaking, that is where the action is in almost all law firms. You need to establish what's called an entrepreneurial network. You need to understand that another genuine way of interacting with people, male as well as female, is to engage in what the guys do. Which is kind of a ritual exchange of favors, like I'll do you this professional good turn and you'll do me this professional good turn. That's not a bad model of friendship, it's just a different default model of friendship. So that's one of the things that women really have to understand. For Asian Americans, this can be particularly challenging because so many, at least from immigrant families, have been taught that the path to success is to keep your head down and just do awesome work. Jeena Cho: [00:23:58] Mmm hmm. Joan Williams: [00:23:59] And of course doing awesome work is a precondition, but it's not the whole schmiel. Because if you just keep your head down and do awesome work, the risk is that people are going to be very happy for you to work for clients so they can go out, get more clients, get the origination credit, and hand the work over to you, who now will have to even work harder because you're not getting any origination credit. I remember that my institute, the Center for WorkLife Law, was doing an analysis of performance evaluations of a large and major law firm. And again and again and again and again, it was so blatant; the Asian Americans were being slated into back-office roles. And believe me, you may be doing important work, but if you're not doing the work that's valued at your organization, you're not going to be promoted and compensated in the top bronze. Jeena Cho: [00:25:12] Joan, thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing your time and your wisdom with us. Thank you so much. Joan Williams: [00:25:20] Thanks for the invitation, Jeena. Closing: [00:25:27] Thanks for joining us on The Resilient Lawyer podcast. If you've enjoyed the show, please tell a friend. It's really the best way to grow the show. To leave us a review on iTunes, search for The Resilient Lawyer and give us your honest feedback. It goes a long way to help with our visibility when you do that, so we really appreciate it. As always, we'd love to hear from you. E-mail us at smile@theanxiouslawyer.com. Thanks and look forward to seeing you next week.

The FT's Emma Jacobs talks to academic and author Joan Williams about her book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America and why class in the workplace matters. As someone who has devoted most of her working life to gender issues, Professor Williams also has plenty to say on the #MeToo movement See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

America is sometimes described as a class-free society — a view not shared by UC Hastings law professor Joan Williams. Williams, author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, argues that misconceptions about class — in particular how the “professional elite” class misunderstands and condescends to the middle, working class — explains much that is wrong with the country. In October 2017, Williams sat down with media innovator Peter Leyden at Berkeleyside's fifth annual Uncharted Berkeley Festival of Ideas in Berkeley to deliver some hard truths about class bias and friction, and how it relates to our current political landscape.

For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have held out "college for all" as the key to social and economic mobility. Have You Heard talks to Joan Williams, author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness about the starkly different class-based attitudes towards college. On the one side: professional elites, who groom their kids for college from day 1. On the other: working class Americans, who often view college--not to mention "credentialed" elites--with suspicion.

Described as having "something approaching rock star status” by The New York Times, our guest Joan C. Williams is a Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of Law.  She is a prominent member of the feminist community who has had her works published in the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, Washington Post and the New York Times. She has authored or co-authored six books and we discuss her latest book White Working Class.  Joan Williams has been awarded the Families and Work Institute Work Life Legacy Award (2014), Hastings Visionary Award (2013), American Bar Foundation's Outstanding Scholar Award (2012), the Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award (2012), the ABA's Margaret Brent Award for Women Lawyers of Achievement (2006), the Distinguished Publication Award of the Association for Women in Psychology (2003), and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2000). She founded the Center for Worklife Law as a way to help women find success in their jobs and joins us on the podcast today as she prepares for her upcoming book. Work Life Law: http://worklifelaw.org/                    Hotline: 415-703-8276 Other Resources: pregnantatwork.com; biasinteruptor.org   Background Silver Spoon Went to Yale, Harvard and MIT No early role models as a child; Admire Van Jones today Teaching employment Law at UC Hastings Law Work Life Law Founded in the 90's Wanted to make world as good for women as it is for men Family discrimination Howe Work Life Law Helps the Community Hotline to call attorney network com resource for expecting mothers/ students Pregnant Women Discrimination Examples: Getting fired, denying accommodations, scrutinizing new mothers Family responsibilities and schedules Schedule Stability Differing schedules and impact on family Students work vs. class schedules Workers with multiple just in time schedules Working with retailers to stabilize schedules Authoring Books What Works for Women at Work: Patterns For Women in the Workplace Allow women to know what I didn't growing up Gender bias not diminishing; talking to successful women on how much bias they face Fixing Gender Bias Proving competence for women/ reversing the trend Strategies to prove competence Masculinity vs Femininity Tight rope for women Strong men are leaders; strong women are not team players Gender Judo: Doing something masculine in a feminine way Women Who Supported Trump Economic anxiety among men and women Most middle class high wage jobs held by men Women depend on husbands blue collar jobs Working Class Hillary Clinton was class clueless Black and White Working Class have similar values/ politics Republicans provide answers for job questions Women Standing Together Maternal Wall/ Tug of War Conflict among women Strategic Distancing- symptom of gender bias Fixing the Class Divide College educated need to stop stereotyping Elites focus more on economic prospects for non-college Americans Understand different cultural norms/ values, not insulting them Wrap up

The headlines have been dominated by accounts of sexual harrasment and sexual assault by polticians, hollywood celebrities, and media moguls. While these accusations and cases grab attention, we know that inappropriate and intimidating behavior goes on in everyday life and in the everyday work place. How to recognize it and deal with it is discussed as Jane McMillan is joined by Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law and the Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings College of the Law.

Air Date: 11/03/2017 Today we look at the battle at the heart of the rift in the progressive movement over strategies on the proper direction to go from here. As is so often the case, the answer is not one or the other but both Be part of the show! Leave a message at 202-999-3991 Join the Best of the Left Social Network! Donate or become a Member to support the show!  Visit: https://www.patreon.com/BestOfTheLeft  Show Notes Ch. 1: Opening Theme: A Fond Farewell - From a Basement On the Hill Ch. 2: Act 1: "Billion-Dollar Mistake" Democrats Neglect People of Color While Failing to Woo White Trump Voters - @DemocracyNow - Air Date 07-31-17 Ch. 3: Song 1:  Vibrant Canopy - Art Of Escapism Ch. 4: Act 2: Taking race and gender as seriously as class - Jacobin Radio (@jacobinmag) - Air Date 8-28-17 Ch. 5: Song 2:  Rotisserie Graveyard - Doctor Turtle Ch. 6: Act 3: Joan Williams on understanding the divide in how different groups are framed - Cape Up - Air Date 10-24-17 Ch. 7: Song 3:  Vibrant Canopy - Origami Ch. 8: Act 4: Alicia Garza on understanding that you can't support only some identity politics - #PoliticallyReactive with @wkamaubell and @harikondabolu - Air Date 10-5-17 Ch. 9: Song 4:  Celestial Navigation - Aeronaut Ch. 10: Act 5: Joan Williams with an economic-focused message that doesn't lose sight of cultural identity - The Zero Hour w: @RJEskow - Air Date 7-29-17 Voicemails Ch. 11: Guns, protection and the age of reason - David from Columbus, OH Ch. 12: Calling a business a job-creator is like calling a car an exhaust-creator - Chris from Fairfax Ch. 13: To boycott or not to boycott - Zach from Virginia Beach Voicemail Music: Loud Pipes - Classics Ch. 14: Final comments on what the Clinton/DNC financial ties revelations may mean for how the party works to regain it’s legitimacy Closing Music: Here We Are - Everyone's in Everyone (Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions and Free Music Archive)  Produced by Jay! Tomlinson Thanks for listening! Visit us at BestOfTheLeft.com Support the show via Patreon Check out the BotL iOS/Android App in the App Stores! Follow at Twitter.com/BestOfTheLeft Like at Facebook.com/BestOfTheLeft Contact me directly at Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Review the show on iTunes and Stitcher!

To further his understanding of the political motivations of the white working-class, Jonathan talks to Joan Williams, author of 'White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America', about how the economy, family and race all play a role.

The white working class has emerged as the most influential and misunderstood block of voters in America, and possibly the world. They elected Trump and ushered in Brexit. What drives them? What do they want? And why do they infuriate the elites?  Robert speaks with Joan Williams, author of “White Working Class,” and uncovers the ugly truth of class conflict in the U.S. and around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor Joan Williams explains the political chasm in America is about class. Author and journalist T.R. Reid has studied the history of tax reform, and every 32 years it happens. So get ready for tax reform in 2018. And Rhode Island Congressman Dave Cicilline and Bill Press talk about the Democratic Party’s “Better Deal.”   Support the Show Are you tired of Tea Party Republicans and Rush Limbaugh dominating the airwaves? Do you want the facts you won't get on Fox -- or even on CNN? Then stay tuned.     Joan Williams Professor Joan Williams says the political chasm is all about class and that the white working class doesn’t want empathy, it wants respect and a modest standard of living.   T.R. Reid Every 32 years, Congress overhauls the tax system. Author T.R. Reid says the cycle pops up again next year, and it is going to happen because no one, absolutely no one, likes the current system.   Dave Cicilline Bill Press interviews Rhode Island Congressman Dave Cicilline about the Democrats’ Better Deal.   Jim Hightower Should churches become Unholy Temples of Dark Money?  

Yale historian Tim Snyder has a new book about tyranny, and unsurprisingly it is a best-seller. Feminist legal authority Joan Williams says the class and cultural warfare could get even uglier when Trump fails to deliver jobs to the white working class. Bill Press interviews Graham Vyse of the New Republic about the Virginia gubernatorial primaries.     Support the Show Are you tired of Tea Party Republicans and Rush Limbaugh dominating the airwaves? Do you want the facts you won't get on Fox -- or even on CNN? Then stay tuned.     Tim Snyder Historian Tim Snyder has a new book about tyranny, and he warns that an authoritarian regime cannot succeed unless the public consents, and it is all too easy for that to happen.   Joan Williams Donald Trump understood what the white working class wanted but he can’t give it to them, says Berkeley professor Joan Williams. And when they realize it, things could get even uglier than they are now.   Graham Vyse Bill Press interviews Graham Vyse of the New Republic about the Virginia gubernatorial primaries.     Jim Hightower Time for Democratic Party leaders to get going – or go

In episode 13, we welcome historian, author, and all around G, Elizabeth Catte to talk about author Joan Williams's attempts to cash in on the current fascination of the so-called 'White Working Class' with her recent articles and new book of the same title. We also talk about Elizabeth's forthcoming book "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia" among other topics, including whether Harry Caudill's* dick ever graced the pages of Time-Life. *If you're wondering who Harry Caudill is, he was basically JD Vance before JD Vance was JD Vance, but more progressive on environmental issues. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_M._Caudill

Joan Williams is a Distinguished Law Professor at the University of California Hastings and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law, which promotes gender and racial equality in the workplace. She’s written extensively on gender and work, including What Works For Women At Work, Reshaping The Work-Family Debate and Unbending Gender: Why Family And Work Conflict and What To Do About It. She and others at Hastings have a new initiative to help reduce bias against women and minorities at work, called Bias Interrupters. In this episode Stew and Joan discuss Joan’s new book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. It is based on a blockbuster article in the Harvard Business Review published days after the presidential election titled What So Many People Don’t’ Get About the U.S. Working Class. They focus on the matter of dignity, an essential aspect of one’s identity that affects all aspects of one’s life. Joan believes the American elite neither understands nor appreciates the working class’s struggle for a prosperous middle class life; a dream that is getting harder and harder to realize. Trump understands the need for good paying jobs for the working class and Joan believes that is why he is now POTUS instead of Hillary. Stew and Joan explore ways the elite and working class can achieve harmony instead of conflict and policy solutions that can help the working class economically. In the second half of the podcast, Stew takes calls from listeners of the radio show who share their perspective about working class dignity. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What do some people misunderstand about the white working class in the US and UK? Law professor and author Joan Williams explains. Then, Alphaville's Alex Scaggs and Matt Klein join host Cardiff Garcia to review the year in finance and economics. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Can you plan to prevent workplace bias before it starts? In some cases yes, says Joan Williams, the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California Hastings. The ABA Journal's Stephanie Francis Ward discusses with Williams tips on how to create what she calls “bias interrupters” to head off potential discrimination.

Can you plan to prevent workplace bias before it starts? In some cases yes, says Joan Williams, the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California Hastings. The ABA Journal's Stephanie Francis Ward discusses with Williams tips on how to create what she calls “bias interrupters” to head off potential discrimination.

Hastings professor Joan C. Williams has been called a “rock star” in the field of gender studies. For more than a quarter of a century, her work in the areas of pregnancy discrimination and work-family accommodation have helped define the issue of gender equality under the law. At Hastings, in 1997, she founded—and still runs—the Center for WorkLife Law, and she’s written many academic articles and books on the topic, including her recent much-lauded title What Works for Women at Work. (Williams cowrote the book with her daughter, Rachel Dempsey.) In August, Hastings colleague Veena Dubal spoke with Williams about her career and about what she thinks American businesses must do to achieve more gender equality. Series: "Legally Speaking" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 30115]

Hastings professor Joan C. Williams has been called a “rock star” in the field of gender studies. For more than a quarter of a century, her work in the areas of pregnancy discrimination and work-family accommodation have helped define the issue of gender equality under the law. At Hastings, in 1997, she founded—and still runs—the Center for WorkLife Law, and she’s written many academic articles and books on the topic, including her recent much-lauded title What Works for Women at Work. (Williams cowrote the book with her daughter, Rachel Dempsey.) In August, Hastings colleague Veena Dubal spoke with Williams about her career and about what she thinks American businesses must do to achieve more gender equality. Series: "Legally Speaking" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 30115]

The Context of White Supremacy hosts the weekly Compensatory Call-In. We encourage non-white listeners to dial in with their codified concepts, new terms, observations, research findings, workplace problems or triumphs, and/or suggestions on how best to Replace White Supremacy With Justice ASAP. We'll use these sessions to hone our use of words as tools to reveal truth, neutralize White people. We'll examine news reports from the past seven days and - hopefully - promote a constructive dialog. #ANTIBLACKNESS 2014 concluded with enormous conflagrations directly related to White Supremacy. Members of the New York Police Department instituted a work stoppage to demonstrate their disgust with with Mayor Bill De Blasio (cowbell). Republican Congressman Steve Scalise is backpedaling, obfuscating and claiming White Ignorance to explain his 2002 speech to a White Supremacist organization. John Crawford's family continues to be terrorized; Crawford's girlfriend (Tasha Thomas) was killed in a gruesome and suspicious car crash. After 57 years Joan Williams was finally permitted to participate in the Tournament of Roses Parade; she was refused entry in 1958 when Whites discovered she was a nigger. Whites scurried to defend the honor of President Lyndon B. Johnson, many of them believed that the recent film Selma painted LBJ as a Racist, just another White opponent of the so called Civil Rights Movement. #AnswersForMiriamCarey INVEST in The COWS - http://tiny.cc/ledjb CALL IN NUMBER: 760.569.7676 CODE 564943# SKYPE: FREECONFERENCECALLHD.7676 CODE 564943# The C.O.W.S. archives: http://tiny.cc/76f6p

UC Hastings Professor Joan Williams welcomes U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for a conversation that touches on a broad range of subjects, from opera to marriage to work/life balance, doctrinal questions, and cases from the 1970's to present, including the court's role in establishing individual rights and equal protection. Series: "Legally Speaking" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 22928]

UC Hastings Professor Joan Williams welcomes U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for a conversation that touches on a broad range of subjects, from opera to marriage to work/life balance, doctrinal questions, and cases from the 1970's to present, including the court's role in establishing individual rights and equal protection. Series: "Legally Speaking" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 22928]

LIVE WITH "MY PERFECT WILL " ARE YOU NEXT?? Some of you may believe that this is a harsh question. Some of you, in spite of all of the natural disasters that have taken place recently around the world, would have the ordacity to believe that there is no  way that this could happen to you any time soon.  Then there are those of you that believe that DEATH is inevitable and beautiful so you are among the few that are actually prepared for the great day.  You've been unselfishly prepared for your family and friends to CELEBRATE your HOMEGOING, rather than to be left in shambles, SAD and ANGRY (both) that you are gone without consideration.  Listen... Although DEATH is actually BEAUTIFUL, I guess until you pass you'll then only know.  Don't miss this show!  You ou may change your perspective about DEATH and you will be given all of the resources to really REST in PEACE!