 Hi everybody we're going to go ahead and get started because we have a star studded event with with several of the real luminaries of the work life field I'm Liza Mundy I'm the director of our work life program here at the New America Foundation which we're calling breadwinning and caregiving in recognition of the fact that as Amory Slaughter has pointed out everybody now at some point in their life will be a breadwinner everybody will be a caregiver at some point and will need caregiving at some point and what we aim to do with our program is to expand and reframe the conversation around work life to acknowledge that everybody male or female is is playing these dual roles we want to expand the conversation around work life to include same-sex households to include lower-income households to include men for sure and so we have today as I said marquee players in this field we have our president and CEO Amory Slaughter author of the magazine article that broke the internet on why we can't have it all at least not all at one time we have Joan C. Williams who is distinguished professor and director of the Center for work-life law at the University of California her writings her research in this field has really been seminal for all of us who are writing and thinking about these issues and we have her daughter Rachel Dempsey who is a student at Yale Law School and blogs for the Huffington Post on women's issues together Joan Williams and Rachel Dempsey are the co-authors of a new book called what works for women at work for patterns working women need to know in order to succeed in the workplace and with that I will hand it over to Amory who's going to be moderating the event the event will go until 1 30 the authors have another event this afternoon that they'll have to go to but they are going to stay around for about they'll have about 10 minutes to sign books so as I said I'll turn it over to them now and I can't wait to hear what they have to say thank you great thank you so this is just a pure pleasure I have to say and and for a number of reasons so the first is after my article had I think what is fair to say a rather bigger reaction than I expected like a I was expecting a little wave and I got a tsunami I was all of a sudden on media all the time and the very first person I called was Joan I didn't really know but I knew that she was the person who I respected the most in the in women work law feminist studies I'm an international relations person I was completely you know I had written an article about my experience and I called Joan and said you know what are the basic outlines of the argument that I should be making in terms of thinking about women and work in life and she talked about the ideal worker and she talked about the work that her center at Berkeley and San Francisco has done so that's the first thing and she was incredibly generous I remember I called you out of the blue and you just you just gave me a lot of help and the second thing is and you don't know this so now I'm writing a book and I finally sat down and read unbending gender cover to cover and every single page is marked and I read it and I thought I don't know why I'm writing a book because Joan Williams already wrote the book that I want to write and that many other people want to write unbending gender is just such a powerful path-breaking analysis of what's really wrong of the the cult of work of the cult of the ideal worker of what we think a worker is supposed to do in terms of being on 24-7 of how market work is completely supported by a flow of family work see I really have read it cover to cover but the idea that of course you can't do market work certainly not the way our society expects you to do market work unless you're supported by a flow of family work and what we've got are women trying to do both the market work and the family work we haven't really changed either the work culture or the true unbending gender which is unbending gender around men as well as around women so if you haven't read unbending gender or you haven't read it for a while I would say go back to do it because all of us in this field oh Joan and certainly that book an enormous debt and the third reason is because it's I wrote the forward to this book and I it's a wonderful book and we're going to talk about it and last year I had the chance I guess it was last fall to go and give a talk at Yale Law School and finally to meet Rachel who I knew only through the pages of this book but I think there's something very special about the idea that this book which is a book that really every as I put in the introduction or in the forward every woman who works should read and every man who works with women should read I mean it's it's really aimed at men and women but what it's very appropriate that it's written by Joan and Rachel because so many of these issues are being discussed again in my view because of the what you said the gender rational divide be that she said sorry the gender rational where where younger women are seeing these issues differently than certainly my generation but above all of the generation just 10 years ahead of me who were the true pioneers I don't know if you put yourself in that generation or not I think you're in between but but but so so anyway so with that as a as a start I'm going to just moderate this conversation for about a half hour and then I'm going to turn it over to all of you because I know you will all have questions and I'm going to just start by it by framing the book for for those of you who not yet read it it is it is framed around four basic barriers and problems or challenges that women encounter at work and and I'm going to let both Joan and Rachel talk about them but I'll just say the first is prove it again prove it again prove it again that you know you can actually do what you've already demonstrated the second is the tightrope the tightrope between being too masculine or too feminine the third which we all know about is the maternal wall hitting the wall when you have children and the fourth is is the tug of war often the tug of war among women so that's the overall frame let me let me start out by sort of asking you each to talk about just to sort of describe some of those I'm going to start actually Joan and ask you to talk about prove it again okay well first of all Emory it's a delight to be here and I'm really honored by your by what you say I'm really touched thank you prove it again is the fact that if you think about a brilliant scientist CEO you name it most people will think about a kind of tall white man and so women don't seem to fit quite as well and consequently they often have to provide and provide more evidence of competence than men in order to be seen as equally competent and that's the first pattern of gender bias I interviewed for this book 127 highly successful women there are really two different studies one was 60 women of color in science because I really wanted to think about how the experience of gender bias differs by race and then for about a three-year period every time I met an extremely savvy woman I just said can I have an hour and a quarter of your time and I so I met very highly successful women and interviewed them about two-thirds of them had encountered this prove it again bias and the the I mean one of the things you say that that I found particularly striking is the you know women men are promoted on potential and women are promoted on performance so this idea that and I've been I've certainly been in these conversations where you're talking about you know can she do it and so often instead of wow you know she's done this and look at the potential it's well let's see you know and that's the exactly that prove it again you know do you say let you prove it once but do it again as opposed to you do it once and you see this and I just have to say that when I was Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School I was 42 when I became Dean and this your point about people think of deans as older white men and so I would constantly be on the airplane or whatever and somebody would say what do you do and I would say Dean and you could just see this kind of oh you're awfully young and it wasn't that I was awfully young it was no so so Rachel let me ask you to talk about the tightrope the the sort of too masculine too feminine and and maybe Joan will want to add in on on how you see that so the tightrope really stems from the fact that the image of success is masculine men are typed as being sort of agentic leaders whereas women are typed as being communal community oriented and kind and so when people see a woman in a position of leadership it feels wrong and the result of that is that women are stereotyped when they act in sort of conventionally masculine ways they're stereotyped as a word that I can't use here but they're they're stereotyped as being having rough elbows is something we hear a lot but when women sort of conform to feminine stereotypes they're seen as not worthy of being leaders not appropriate leaders and are treated accordingly and so the tightrope is really about walking the balance between those two sets of stereotypes and we found in speaking with the women that Joan interviewed we found that in order to be really successful you had to balance being seen as as masculine and being seen as authoritative and also being seen as sort of as kind and approachable and not facing that backlash that that women in power often find they face from the people around them so this again having worked for Hillary Clinton right and you know she every woman politician says this immediately you know they get into the the public realm and immediately you know either you're not tough enough to handle national security or you're just too tough and I I remember talking to Meg Whitman about this after she ran in California so you have a Republican woman a Democrat when Meg Whitman said to me you know I never felt closer to Hillary obviously they're different ideologically but they had exactly that experience and one really interesting factoid that fits in here is that one of the times that Hillary Clinton got the highest approval ratings was when she cried because she was doing what I call gender judo I mean I mean and the gender judo really is that you have to behave in masculine ways in order to be seen as competent okay but you also have to show that you're competent at femininity and so what many women do and Hillary Clinton was doing this genuinely but it happened to work and the reason it clicked was because everybody knows that Hillary Clinton is is competent but she was taking a feminine stereotype and so she was getting the best of both worlds and taking that feminine stereotype that typically holds women back and flipping around its power to propel her forward that's the judo I mean who would have ever thought that the way to advance as a woman would be to cry but so typically it's not right we're not offering that as career advice so so I before I want to talk about the maternal wall but I can't help but ask since we're talking about tipping a little too masculine or a little too feminine you all dressed a little differently this is one of the areas that we had a lot of back and forth and Rachel will talk about that a little bit so I tend towards more too feminine problems and Joan tends towards more too masculine problems and obviously saying feminine and saying masculine is a very gross approximation of sort of what we feel comfortable with but I'm just gonna go with it so while we were working on the tightrope chapter we had a lot of back and forth about what strategies worked for what problems and I'm gonna use the example of the the posse strategy so one strategy that we suggest in the tightrope chapter is to find a group of people at work who you feel comfortable with and who you sort of agree to compliment each other's successes draw attention to each other's successes so that way you're not you're not bragging and you're not doing sort of self-promotion which is often people often react to that negatively in a woman and so to me the posse strategy is great because it means you can get other people to promote you and you don't have to do it yourself because I think that's really hard and scary for Joan the posse strategy is great because you can have self-promotion without the backlash so for the two of us yeah it fits both of us but it fits both of us for very different reasons and I think that having that perspective in the book that back and forth we I hope made the the strategies fit a much wider group of people I mean I think it did I very consciously set out to write this book with number one or journalists and as I would say Rachel was part of a cult in college it's called the Yale Daily News yes it is but also with somebody who is much younger because I think when older women offer career advice particularly women of my generation I always say we had to feel really comfortable with masculinity because we were in we grew up in rooms of men and so if we didn't we wouldn't be there and so I think a lot of the career advice that women my age traditionally offer is sort of just it's a disconnect because a very different and much wider group of women is now in these high-powered roles so Rachel was perfect also I chose the best writer I could get well you know again Hillary Clinton talks about the sisterhood of the traveling pants suits and I was just at a meeting where a woman stood up and talked about the first time that a woman wore pants on Capitol Hill in the house right when the women first started getting elected they all wore dresses so part of it was that we you know we needed to be seen like men I I do think when I started teaching at Harvard Law School all the women so we're both law professors I was originally and Jonah still a law professor all the women law professors at Harvard Law School never wore dresses right I mean that to where if you wore dresses and heels you were taken as a secretary so if you wanted to be taken seriously as an old as a professor you couldn't wait look traditionally feminine and I loved it I mean I like dresses you can see that and I like heels and so I remembered a dressing and really being then people thought it was a political statement that you must be a conservative because if you were so the the gender signaling I think you will I think this generation is freer to choose you can dress much more I want so let's talk about I'm not going to talk ask you about this but let's talk about the maternal wall well you know what's been going through my mind as we sit here is the the first article I wrote on any of this is called deconstructing gender and I actually was finishing it just about the time that Rachel was was being born a few years after actually I it was published in 1989 you were born in 86 so yeah Nikki was being born so here's the story when I was finishing the footnotes to unbending gender one Saturday at the office I remember getting a phone call and a sweet little girl saying mommy come home the maternal wall is both inside us and outside us a lot of people have written and I and Anne Marie have written about how it's inside us and Rachel found a wonderful epigram for one of the maternal wall chapters she said you know there's no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one I think the sure way not to be a very good mother is to insist on being perfect one but quite apart from the fact that the maternal wall is something we internalize it's also in case we don't get the message it's something that's out there if you give one study is worth staying in detail if you give people identical resumes one but not the other a mother the mother is 79% less likely to be hired half as likely to be promoted and offered an average of $11,000 less in salary this is an order of magnitude larger than glass ceiling bias and so we we give people very concrete strategies when you return from maternity leave you should ask for a meeting with your boss and say I'm really excited to be back I really want to hit the ground running these are my career goals for the next year and let's talk about how we can work together to achieve them because you are overcoming that very strong assumption that you're no longer competent or committed one other strategy that I think is really important I get we of course at the Center for Work Life Law we're sort of a hub for all of this and we hear so many times of people who say no my my supervisor my colleague said to me I don't know how you can work so hard my wife could never leave the kids like that and so the strategy for that is what we call told story was wrong happy families aren't all alike that's perfect for your family but this is what's right for mine we spent a lot of time coming up with retorts some of them pretty sassy in throughout the book Rachel has what is they called sharp sharp comebacks for rough moment for rough smooth comebacks yes so that's we we kind we spent a lot of time coming back with smooth comebacks both that are very low risk all the way up to sort of true moxie and I actually want to add on to that because I was obviously the sweet little girl voice saying mommy come home and I growing up Jones daughter I obviously thought a lot about work family work family conflict and when I was a kid my takeaway was that there was a terrible irony in her work and in the fact that her work meant that she had to work late sometimes and she had to travel and she had to you know have visiting professorships and there was tension between us I think when I was when I was younger and so in writing the maternal wall chapter it was really important to me to try to get the message across that there is going to be tension and that's going to be a part of the experience and it doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong as a mother and I am so incredibly grateful to be Jones daughter but that doesn't that doesn't mean we didn't have fights and we had them we have them a lot and so it's very important to me to be able to participate in her work and also I really want people to know that you know you're you're gonna have work family tension and that doesn't mean that you're not being the best mother you can be I would I would add to that because my own mother is a fabulous artist I mean she's a very very talented artist but and she really grew as an artist as we as her three children went to college and encouraged her and where are where her biggest fans but she didn't have she wasn't working outside the home when for the first 20 years of my life my my and I knew she would have been happier had she had a professional identity as well as a personal identity which meant as a mother I have never doubted that I'm a better mother because I work and I have never you know my my sons will tell you that from an early age you know when they pulled the guilt trip I would I would just be like you know there's you're not guilty me I'm a better mother because I do what I do I would be unhappy and I would be a worse mother and I have no doubt about it and the one time I actually stayed home for a year they had no doubt about it either we were on sabbatical and you know after a year they were like goodbye mom you know so so I really I think you're right it's it's different families have different ways but also different you know and this is a highly personal thing in terms of are you somebody who likes to do one thing all at once and really pour yourself into it and maybe you want to be home more and really be a mom full-time and then be more of pouring yourself into your career are you somebody who likes to do multiple things at once are you you know in that that that is a it seems to me there is no one recipe absolutely one thing you said Joan before we go on to the the tug of war talk a little bit about the social psychology because at the beginning of the book you have a very powerful statement where you say you know I found an entire academic discipline that allows us to get past just talking about stereotypes and anecdotes so maybe you can talk a little bit about that this book really rests on 35 years of experimental social psychology some of this is the implicit association test which people might have heard about a lot of these are the matched resume studies I just mentioned one and all all of this takes place either online or it takes place in social psychology labs in at universities and this is one of the first times actually the only time I'm aware of that someone has taken all of that literature boiled it down and asked women who are actually at work hey any of this sound familiar the the striking thing is that 96% of the women I talked to said yes one woman said every syllable one woman said you just described my life and so there is been some question about whether these experimental studies actually describe what goes on at work but one of the things this book shows is that they do and another element that's been very little discussed is that women of color reported more of every single type of gender bias than the white women did a lot of variation among the women of color in terms of the which of the types of bias they experienced more and which less but by and large they experienced more of the gender bias I want to come back to that in a minute to talk about also that experience which you call double jeopardy in that chapter and but just to say I mean the power of these experiments is that they uncover you know the unconscious biases very few of us live in worlds where there's avert sexism of the kind that there used to be where anybody's gonna say to you no you know I don't think a woman can do the same job as a man and they some may think it but I think many don't think it but it's that deeper layer right it's that layer that says my mother hmm she doesn't need to earn as much as a man or she won't be as committed those aren't conscious but they come out when in these experiments but let's let's talk about the final obstacle the tug of war among women and I'll let Rachel talk about that a little bit because as a younger woman I talked to many younger women who say to me my male bosses are actually better to work for than my female bosses which I always find very jarring and it's obviously not universal but I've heard it I've given hundred you know scores of speeches and that's a very frequent question so maybe you can talk about this little so the tug of war is what happens when gender bias against women turns into conflict among women and I think that the the things we've talked about in the last couple of minutes a lot of them have been very very personal we've talked about decisions related to to child care and child rearing we've talked about sort of whether you are more comfortable being feminine in the office or more comfortable being masculine in the office and the backlash from from both of those and so I think that gender wars happens when those very personal decisions come under criticism from other women and I think that the the really important takeaway with gender bias is that this tension happens sorry with with regards to gender wars is that this tension happens because of the underlying gender biases these judgments about what the right way to be a woman these judgments really lead women to be very sensitive about their own choices and it can lead to major conflicts in the workplace and in the professional sphere when people make different choices yeah I mean I do think that the instinct of feminists up to now has been to deny this and say you know you're talking about the queen bee and that's just stereotyping women I do think the queen bee is stereotyping women actually this is not a problem of the personality problem of an individual woman what the studies show is that it women who have experienced discrimination early in their careers tend to distance themselves from other women and why wouldn't they that's that's just politically sadding think of Marissa Myers I'm not a girl at Google I'm a geek at Google she's identifying with the in group she's not she's not identifying with the out group so I think it's time to stop denying because that this is happening because like Anne-Marie young women to say this to us all the time and to say it is happening but it's a symptom of gender bias in the environment and you know two bits of advice because this is basically a book about not about how to depressingly wallow I think a bit of advice to women my age is to recognize that the younger women are simply different from what we what we are like they are different and that success that we've been able to create that room for them and for younger women I think it's really important for you young ladies to recognize that one of the reasons that we are not helping you a senior women as much as you wish we were is that we're navigating all four of these patterns of gender bias ourselves and we don't have often as much power as you assume that we do I would agree with that the other thing I would add I often start out when I talk to a group of women by saying you know but for the women 10 years ahead of me I would have a radically different life we owe them an unbelievable debt and your generation doesn't really understand that because we've succeeded I mean we've succeeded so that mad men looks like some ancient history as opposed to something that many of us can actually remember and so I think it's very important to just to honor that enormous sacrifice and struggle and I always say I came out of law school I came out of school in 1980 and by 1990 when I was looking for a law teaching job law schools were looking for qualified women but in 1980 not and so I answered law teaching so that so exactly so the difference between us then is that exact 10 years where where because of your your success and you're also right that that to be a woman to do women's studies in law law teaching was I mean that was not the that was the out group right when when I went to Harvard Law School there was not a single woman on the faculty none not one and I went into the Dean as part of the Women's Law Association I said he's come to my attention there's not a single woman on the faculty and he said well you know we've really tried hard there are just unqualified and I said not one in the whole world and he said no that would include Ruth Ginsburg right I mean there were Ruth Ginsburg who left Harvard and went to Columbia because of her husband and then Harvard wouldn't give her a degree because she hadn't completed the Harvard Law School they claim her now so so let's let's turn to the solutions right we've with those are the four you know the big barriers and I love this book in part because it's easy to remember them and it's easy to sort of think to yourself yep one two three four but you're right so much of the power of the book is the solution so talk about some of your favorite you can't go through them all but some of the we've talked about the posse but talk about some of your favorites well let's just start with prove it again the first thing I think for young women is not to do this to yourself so one of the things that we often hear is that when a if some if a promotion requires for example nine things the guys will go for it at six yeah and the women will wait until they have ten it's why we we we feel like we're a little bit more at risk and you know what we are but the solution is not to wait till you have ten because the guys will do it at nine so I think it's very important to to put yourself out there and you know and lean in as some of our friends say yes the if you see this being done if you see a woman with double standards being applied for example in a meeting you can just very mildly say you know I I think we finally recognize what we're really looking for in a candidate so let's go back to the top of the pile and make sure we found all of the relevant candidates so the solutions I think for many people are the most useful are these sort of low-risk solutions but one of the things that Rachel and I did and she'll talk maybe more about it is we I assembled a group of very wise women to help us write the book because I'm not the most politically savvy person I know not by a long shot and so there's a pattern Rachel calls the stolen idea where a woman says something and it's overlooked a man says something and he's Albert Einstein and one woman's reaction she said well what I just say as well there an echo in here just to go to sort of talk a little bit more about the stolen idea this is one that's one pattern that really I think rang true to a lot of people and we in a in a meeting of the the wise women we just asked the room what would you say if you were in that situation or what have you said when you've been in that situation because it's such a common experience to have and the the answers really really ranged from sort of saying like thank you Joe I'm glad you picked up on that idea to saying sorry you must have been looking at your blackberry when I mentioned that this was a couple years ago it probably would have been iPhone so that that's a that's such a great one we've all been through it I actually was when it was pointed out to me it was called the butterfly syndrome that a woman would say something and it would lie there on the table table like a pupa and the man would say something and you know fly and so the things that I've seen are often when they're multiple women in the room you pick up on it for the other woman so you know if you say something that I always come in and this happened a lot at the State Department and every woman knew what was going on the other woman says yes you know as Rachel just said after the guys made the point so that you come in and make clear to the room which is a little easier than the woman herself having to say that the other thing I've done is to pull aside younger men and say to them this is what just happened and I say you know you're going to work with a lot of talented women you need to know you need to recognize this this is what just happened you said this or another guy said this and it was ignored you know the woman said this then you said it and suddenly it took off and this is an area when I said this is a book that women who work read and men who work with women this is exactly a place where guys once they're sensitized to it can be extremely helpful and many of our husbands I think I know my husband is very aware of it not always when he does it but when other but so I think that that is a really great example of how you can you can make that that difference any others one other thing that I think is really important which I've kind of gotten an F minus on I have to say in my life but is how to negotiate for for a raise which is another big issue for women one of the things and Rachel's much more moderate on this but I will just rant that drives me a little nuts is the whole women don't ask conversation because it is true that women don't ask it's also true that if they do ask people are less likely to want to work with them and they're less likely to be hired oh forgot to tell you about that one so all those organizations that are teaching women to ask are basically teaching you know feeding them into the maw of it's not going to work and because you when you ask you have to walk that tightrope asking and negotiating for a raise is something that's seen as masculine so what the studies show and this is also what we found is that you have to do gender judo you ask for in the name of your group you ask but say I'm worried about how X might feel about this because blah so what a good woman always attuned to the comfort level of others so but we are very concrete in the book about how you ask for a raise first of all the next time a recruiter calls you even if you're happy at your job don't hang up she's your new best friend because she can tell you how much you're worth and you need to get those you need to get the facts down as part of your salary negotiation and that's a very good resource to get to go in for a warrant is for armed because you can't as a woman go on go in and say I'm the most brilliant thing since sliced bed because then your name begins with a B so you need to start with the facts absolutely you have a slightly different view on this I I I mean I do agree I think that it's good advice and I think that this this shows the difference between where Joan and I lie on the tightrope I think it's important for me to hear that I need to ask because my instinct is going to be not to do it in the first place and so I I need that extra encouragement to go into the office but I do think that it's very important to go in and go prepared so you have to go knowing what your achievements are you have to go making an argument for for why you deserve this raise so it's time I've been here for X amount of time other people in my position make this amount of money these are my accomplishments this is how much money I've earned for the firm going there with objective facts and I also think that the being willing to to leave is often a huge huge plus in that so just know that you know if you go in there with that I have another offer or I've been looking or you know I've been in contact with recruiters that can be a huge help in sort of getting your your foot in the door on a raise or a promotion and I have to say one of the best things about lean in is I have already seen three people ask and have said you know I know I have to do this right I know I have to do and it's great it's and that when you're right how to do it it's very important I have another friend Kate Clark who wrote a book called dare to ask that also talks about the strategies because you know doing it cold can can backfire but I love that I mean I love seeing the immediate impact of lean in where where women now feel like you know yep this is what I got to do the other thing I there are two other things I would say is one is men are often great coaches here all right and I've talked to a lot of guys recently who really take pride in sort of say and actually Cheryl Sandberg talks about that and I wrote a story on the lean in website where I talk about my husband the first leadership job I ever took I was going to suggest somebody else and my husband said well why why not you and I was like well and he's like no come on you're better than so so you can use your the men in your life whether they're your brothers or your fathers or your spouses or whatever I think is very helpful and the last thing I've always found to be helpful is to think of myself as the breadwinner right and my husband earns a good living but I am the primary breadwinner and in negotiating I would often say you know I'm the primary breadwinner for my family it's important you know that I need to make sure that I that I'm doing what I need to do and it helps me thinking that way right that I'm not asking for more money for me I'm I'm supporting you know my my family so I think that that's another way that you can kind of edge into that space it's one o'clock I'm sure you have no questions at all there is a microphone Liza's there I think there's a microphone that will come around but raise your hand and you know here comes Leanna great raise your hand and introduce yourself right there yeah hello hi Anne Marie Weidner Georgetown University I'm wondering about class and you mentioned at the beginning you interviewed successful women so would any of your strategies would anything would you say anything different if you were speaking to a group of working class women and men or you know even lower than that thank you this book is really written in the vein of business advice literature and so as you know Henry my last book was about class I haven't studied what the gender dynamics are at work in different class locations and so I would say this I don't know how much of this carries over I do know that it varies from industry to industry the the interviews of the scientists were very different in tone than the interviews of the the other women in law and business and I think part of that was because they were women of color and part of it was because there were women in science well and of course Liza Mundy's book the richer sex talks about you know how in the middle middle class and middle income women are out earning men increasingly and so of course that puts but and I remember talking to Michelle Martin about that experience which she said a lot of women don't want to challenge the masculine authority of their spouses so they kind of put the money on the table but without you know it's sort of helping out in other words not not recognizing this is a whole different set of gender gender dynamic other questions here on the side there on the front yeah what would you say introduce yourself hi I'm Allison Crawford and I work at AAA science vaccine and I was wondering what would you say for younger women or how would you I guess tell us to approach some of us that have read lean in and come in and listen to talk and are a bit more aware of some of the gender biases and I wouldn't want to say aggressive isn't the right word but more eager to approach the latter and we work for very nice women of an older generation but may or may or may not be as aggressive or you know they've been content in their position and don't really ask for the parishes or the any other kind of promotions I guess so I see this is sort of a tug of war issue among among women where you're saying there's an older generation who tends to be sort of happier to play a more feminine role and you as a younger generation are sort of let's go for it let's go for it that's a that's a recipe for sometimes conflict among the women and how do you how do you diffuse that any ideas I have some I think it's it's important to to look around you and maybe past your sort of immediate work environment to see what opportunity what other opportunities are out there I think it's it's important to recognize that you maybe have different aspirations than the women you work with and do what you need to do with that information but don't try to you can't demand that they sort of change anything about their own lives in order to help you one thing and I think Anne Marie said this before and it's really important is particularly if you're going to be in conflict with a woman of an older generation it's really helpful to start by saying you know I really appreciate the fact that I'm only here because of you very simple just thank you yeah it goes along yeah yes here in the front does this work now yes yes so I'm gonna really introduce yourself okay I'm gonna enjoy introducing myself I'm Liana Zizoulin I work in international development and the reason I'm gonna enjoy it is because I'm gonna mention that I'm Jones law school roommate my godmother there's a picture of Liana and I both looking with her back-to-back looking very rotund and I'm very happy to have been to have been able to be here I should have been in South Sudan but as you may have noticed people got evacuated and the point that I wanted to to raise actually occurred because of that I'm back unexpectedly and have talked to a hen hunter or two here or there and somebody said yes but you've worked only part-time and I'm like what my youngest child is 25 I worked part-time exactly from 1988 to 1995 the last century and I thought I've got a purge my resume somehow that should not be coming up but is that are used and this came up from a female recruiter who pointed out that she was older than I was so I'm just wondering how you guys want to comment on part-time and Joan you and I have discussed this the ins and outs of that many time over the years so I I just want to say I remember one of the women that we spoke with said that she had had gone part-time for a while at her job and she needed it she needed to do it for personal reasons but she I think she called it a career bender she said it was just a huge it was very hard to get out from under it and she felt like she was walking around with a pt on her back and I think that that's a common experience what this woman ultimately did was go to another go to another firm find another job but that doesn't sound like it's helping you here yeah it's what we actually did a series of studies on it it's called we I call it flexibility stigma and the flexibility stigma is and it's it's going part-time is one of the triggers for maternal wall bias remember that unbelievably strong bias for men it's actually a femininity bias even asking for parental leave triggers strong organizational sanctions because the men are seen as as too feminine and I would just advise you to take it off your resume society can't handle it strong but there they're too so I've been thinking about this a lot also and and the your piece on flexibility stigma is great so now when I give a talk I tell people don't start by asking for the flexibility policies most places have flexibility policies of some kind or other start by talking about how do we combat flexibility stigma I mean nobody likes stigma right that is the that's the place to start is to say you know how are we going to fight the fact that if anybody woman or man takes advantage of these flexibility policies they are discriminated against and that's a better place to start the conversation and you if you start by accepting that so that's one thing that I think we we have to take this on we really absolutely have to take this on we have to take it on for men as well as for women because you know if we want men to be able to take the leave that we need them to take then they can't be discriminated against but the other thing that's helping this that I've seen a lot of is increasingly sort of portfolio careers where you know I'm part-timer writer I'm part-time a teacher I'm part-time a speaker I'm part-time a manager and increasingly people when I advise younger women I say you know look at who you want to be and look at the set of skills that they have and think about how to acquire those skills at different points of your life so even if you are you know working in the community you can learn how to fundraise you know you can learn how to be a speaker and I'm increasingly seeing guys who are not any one thing right that they are and part of it startup culture part of it is is and tech culture more broadly so that part-time looks less like well I was in on the career ladder and I wasn't the ideal worker to borrow John's term and rather you know I have a flexible career and a portfolio of skills I'm again that does not help your resume but but I think it's no it's a great example yes there in the back we've got I'm going to go on the right in the back first just because I've been playing to the left oops my right sorry over there yeah and then you all come back to you I promise hello I'm a real use the resist and I'm a government attorney I'd like to ask was there any difference for the women of color when you talked about the butterfly syndrome or because you know as an activist who had to really push I'm of a different generation than some of you in the room it really seems like it takes a whole lot of time to get everybody really liking me before I can do something and that's annoying you know like to act as if I have to go oh well thanks Bob you know that is really tiresome and are other people tired and is there anything we can do to push this along that's great you know it's funny and I'd like to hear from Rachel you sound ma'am as if you're a lot more like me I you know there's two ways to look at this one is it would be a better world if men had to do this kind of emotion work too and the other is this is tiresome why do I have to do this when I have this goal I mean that is that doing the emotion work in order to have what you your message accepted is exactly what I call gender judo and you know the the fascinating thing is that the the studies there are very few studies that look at both race and gender my friend Robert Livingston has done most of them and one of the things that Robert found is that the there was a in the in the 70s there was a hypothesis that women of color were in double jeopardy and race as well as gender and it's a hypothesis so I was trying to figure out whether it was true the the women that the women of women of color really differ from group to group but black women specifically no matter how high up they were felt they could not make one single mistake one single mistake and there was one amazing story of a lawyer at one of the high high up at one of the largest companies in the country who when she showed up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed proud of her new job was asked her LSAT scores never heard that happening to a white woman but the other study that Robert found and I found this as well though clearly it's not always true from your comments is that African-American women are allowed to behave in more dominant ways than white women before they encounter pushback now it sounds like it didn't happen to you but Robert found it in the lab and I also found it in my interviews of course at a certain point you're an angry black woman and we know what that begins with right do you want to add I just want to talk about your point that this is exhausting that's something I'm at the very beginning of my career and sometimes when I look at the expectations of women really especially starting out my reaction is like this seems exhausting I don't even know why people try and I think that that's a that's a danger of this conversation and what the book does and what what works for women at work does is really give concrete strategies to deal with individual instances so it doesn't seem quite so overwhelming I also think it's important to recognize that it's not your fault the fact that people you have such a hard time getting people to like you is not your fault it's because of these these stereotypes in these biases and I find personally I find that really comforting to to realize that if I'm having these particular problems it's not because I'm doing something wrong and there are things that I can do right to change them or make them better but these are a lot of these problems that we face just aren't our fault and I think that's important to keep in mind yes on the left but yeah hi I'm Alicia Shepherd I'm a journalist and I'm former NPR on Budsman and I've done studies about the lack of women on op-ed pages the lack of women on panels particularly on the Sunday morning shows the lack of women as sources and you know sometimes it's not a matter of not reaching out to the women it's the women saying oh no ask someone else my boss would be better at this and so I'm wondering where does that come from I mean is this are we talking about kindergarten that that women think they don't have anything to say or that they somebody else could say it better or I'm sure it's not the women in this room but there are so you're asking why did the women themselves take themselves out of the running yeah yeah I mean I I think there's a couple things that might be relevant obviously I don't know these women and I haven't done this study but if a woman says my boss would do it better what my intuition is is that her boss would be all ticked off if she got invited and he didn't that's called that's called gender bias that's called the tightrope right that one of women's job part of women's job description is to make the men around her not feel threatened that is not part of men's job description in anything like the same proportion another thing I would wonder is if a woman is on those talk shows where there's so few women are people going is she going to be attacked for being but she for having bad lipstick color for wearing the wrong clothes are people going to listen to her or she can have to scream to be heard in which course guess what her name begins with I just think it's I think it's really important when women are taking themselves out of these positions to to retain a focus on the fact that going on those talk shows in this environment when there's so few women is different for women because what works for women at work is really different often than what works for men I'd also just like to add that one of the classic studies on the double standard for men and women and on the sort of associations with masculinity and femininity found that women are stereotyped as being communal and they're expected to be communal and that's a great example of community oriented behavior I can't do that but here's someone else who can and so I think at some level that's how women are trained to act and it takes a lot of consciousness and it takes a lot of you know really paying attention to the dynamics around you to be able to overcome that and that's one of the reasons why we hope people will will read this book and recognize that these stereotypes exist because if you get the message that you're supposed to be communal then often you you will be I just add one more thing also because I've thought about this a lot and in foreign policy it's just a joke I mean there there are there's so few of us who are and those of us who do do it of course are asked over and over and over and we don't have time and there plenty of other really talented women out there but some part of it goes back to what Joan said about the prove it again and our own standards right so many younger women understandably are like ooh I'm not sure if I can do that men are socialized when they feel insecure to puff themselves up and put themselves out there right I mean they it's like in nature they get all puffed up and they and even though they're insecure that's their reaction women often are I have exactly the opposite reaction which again these are survival strategies in lots of ways but the fear is legitimate it's to how you react to the fear and again that's where Lena and I think can be very helpful where it says you know Cheryl Sandberg says even when I'm really scared inside I know you know to raise my hand and sit at the the table and so it's it's re-socialization I think in many ways of what you do when you're insecure the other thing I would just mention just picking up on that theme is Amy Cuddy's work and she talks about body language which we also talk about in the book look at how the three of us are sitting we're sitting all in very feminine ways at their you know I actually even primate studies show that people that that primates who take up little room are signaling deference to higher status primates and so I would say all of us who aren't wearing skirts you know Don Draper they've done all this work that shows if you go like this right you're more likely to get an interview if you do this power power poses and that shows how how we're all on the tightrope no okay who would like to ask the next question there on the left yeah right there and then I'll come up to you in the front here hi Trisha Daniels managing director at Alvarez and Marcella forensic account and CPA and I was prior partner at the Big Four so I've dealt with these issues a lot question regarding the maternal I forget what you called it wall thank you as you so my children are now grown I have my youngest is a senior in college and my other son is out of out of school and working does that go away I'm hoping I'm hoping the answer is yes um does the you mean does the the bias against you at work you know one of the savviest women I interviewed said you know when my kids were young she said I never let on that I had them now I don't recommend that that's you know that is a woman whose response is very deeply shaped by very strong bias right and I don't know that women have to do that anymore although actually that's what I did by and large but the same woman said you know when they're older I make sure I bring them around because when they're older what she was doing is walking that tightrope she was signaling I am extra extraordinarily successful at everything so when they're older trot them around now you know should women have to do this I have to say that when when Rachel was a toddler I had my professional picture taken with Rachel so I didn't completely hide but then this is kind of my issue so I mean should women have to do this no this is ridiculous right just because you're helping to raise the next generation does not mean that you're less powerful contributor in professional roles that is absolutely nonsense so and I would you know if you don't want to do it absolutely don't do it but that is what works for women at work I would just add though that you it doesn't sound like you've taken time out but I think age discrimination is an enormous part of this that we're not facing that many women who do work differently or take part time or don't work outside the home when their kids are there then when they want to get back in and they've got 20 30 years ahead of them and a lots of credentials are not getting considered I mean in our discipline in academia there's no reason you can't get tenure at 50 you're writing books you're gonna write books till you're 80 and yet you're not even looked at right so the the issue to me often is not are you being discriminated against or because you're a mother but are you being discriminated against because you're now older because because you were a mother they're on the side and then I'll come to the point no turn around right there and then I'm sorry I'm discriminated but older and Wendy Khan I'm a labor union lawyer and plaintiff's employment lawyer the first question I think was about class and Joan indicated you know that this wasn't your book obviously is not focused on this it's terrific I'm just wondering if you're aware if there is any research on the question of obstacles and solutions for people who are not professional women highly successful or hopefully highly successful and my next question whether it's your research or somebody else's is with regard to the younger people who are you know hopefully moving into successful professional roles is there any kind of consciousness in that journey about their interactions with people who are not professionals that they meet in their own workforce or otherwise I'm just curious if there's you know any consciousness particularly of that and you know where this comes from that with respect to the first one of the focuses of the Center for Work Life Law now is on pregnancy accommodation for blue collar women what happens to blue collar women in the center is always worked across class is my sense is that employers actually didn't want to hire them in these jobs in the first place so they wait until they become pregnant and then deny them very simple accommodations I'll just give two cases one of them gross the first is that a woman was getting persistent urinary tract infections incident to pregnancy and so her doctor ordered her to carry a water bottle a certain large company fired her rather than give her the about the right to carry water bottle the second was that a woman was having severe nausea and so she asked for a workstation closer to the bathrooms and the employer said no but I'll give you a larger waste basket one of the the the Center has an article coming out in what is it called Yale one of the Yale journals Yale Law and Policy Review in which we argue that women are currently entitled to a very broad range of pregnancy accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act not because pregnancy is a disability but because a lot of the problems that women have in during pregnancy qualify under the ADA just one more example and then I'll hand it over to Rachel many would pregnant women get carpal tunnel so it simply cannot be that if you get carpal tunnel for any reason in the world other than pregnancy you're covered under the ADA but not if your carpal tunnel stems from pregnancy and we're very much hoping that the EEOC will issue guidance based on that theory so in terms of the the generational question I think one thing that's happening that that has never happened before and we'll see how it ends up playing out is that gender bias and the types of gender bias women face are becoming very split along class lines and I think Liza has done work on how the middle middle-class women with the rise of the service economy are developing much more economic pull sort of wealthier upper-class women are still facing these the issues that we talk about in this book and that's not to say that that middle-class women aren't either but the the relationship between men and women I think has has split along class lines in ways that the effects of that remain to be seen one sort of side effect of not I don't know if it's right to say side effect but one effective women weren't we're moving into the workplace is that a lot more care work is outsourced and that's another thing that there's just starting to be research on on how that plays out along class lines and how that affects the economy and also relationships among women this book obviously doesn't doesn't deal directly with those issues but I think that there's important scholarship being done and my generation of women is gonna have a big part in that so the last questions over here in the in the middle but let me just say as the microphone is coming Allison Wolf has written this book double X that talks exactly about how now it used to be all women's experience was the same in the sense that what defined us where we were mothers for those of us who are mothers or caregivers just more broadly and that now as as wealthy elite women have a radically different experience than the with the experience of their caregivers who are typically low income and that that's actually divided the feminist movement in various ways one of the reasons I like red winning in caregiving is caregiving encompasses everybody right I mean caregiving focuses on the caregiver whether that's a stay-at-home mom or whether that's the person a professional woman has hired to give care for her parents or for her children the last question thank you Monique Reiser with childcare of America I have two questions both involving children one is I'm a mom I have two boys and I've often wondered how I'm a single mother how we can raise boys to be I guess less part of the problem as I get older my boys are 15 and 10 and then and sometimes I'm hoping just by living by example by going to work every day and and taking care of things around the house that they'll learn they'll just equality will just be part of their experience but I'm wondering if you had any thoughts about how do how we influence boys to be part of the solution and the second one is about childcare and just what help the factor that childcare plays in in women working in access to quality and affordable childcare I have something to say about boys but go ahead with respect to boys I I think the thing to recognize is that the way that women have shifted their gender roles is that we kept the old and added the new we can perform femininity really well I mean look at us we're all very different but we are you know we're girls girls girls right but then we also are very highly accomplished but we don't we want to make sure you know both of those things and that's the way it's going to happen for boys as well so I think of my son who I will say very little about because I'm not authorized to talk but what I will tell you is that he he's a waitlist lifter and he makes really good pies those are his two you know at a certain point that he's gone on but at a certain point those are his two signatures so what he's doing is you know unbending gender right there he's saying I am as manly as it gets and that doesn't exclude being feminine and Brad pits the same you know he has babies you know from every bicep right yeah and so I think that's what we have to help I mean that I've taught a lot I thought a lot about gender flux among men and in fact that's one of the focuses of the Center for Work Life Law and that's why we did research on the flexibility stigma because that's one of the things that is keeping men locked in and so you know as Ruth Bader Ginsburg said a long time ago you know women are locked into a certain role men are also locked into a role and I think what we're all trying to say is that everybody would be healthier and happier if we all had just a little more room I don't I mean I have obviously I've not raised a family I grew up with a brother who is wonderful and I just I think that my parents did a great job of not enforcing any gender role expectations on us but also letting us do what we were comfortable with I'm much more feminine than Joan is and I didn't wear pants until I was in third grade I just I never wore pants and at around that time Joan actually started wearing skirts a lot too she started wearing dresses they're comfortable pants today to enact so I think that that allowing your in terms of just sort of child rearing allowing your children to both break gender stereotypes and also enact them in so far as they're comfortable with them helps create a message that it's not about sort of what gender you're enacting it's about what you're comfortable with and what you're interested in and I would just say as a final comment you know I wasn't at all a perfect mother and look what I got I'll end on the boy mother of boys because I think about this a lot and my sons are very funny on feminist subjects as you might imagine but so there's two things one when I was still a professor I started at the end of my time every time a young man would come into my office to ask advice I would talk to him and then I'd say you know have you thought about what you're going to do if you want a family I would exact exactly the same question that I of course always ask women why on earth are we asking women that question and not asking men that question they're the family and so I started just making it routine have you thought about how you're going to fit together a career in a family and I say that because what's come to what I have come to believe raising boys is that we're raising girls with more choices than we're raising boys we're raising girls with the idea that you can be a breadwinner or caregiver or both or however you want to divide it we are still raising boys with the idea that your worth is defined by how much you earn and how far you succeed in on your career ladder and so what I tell my sons is you know if you want a you should think about how much you want to be at home their father is the lead caregiver so they see that do you know one son wants to be an actor I say great I sure hope you marry a woman you know who's gonna have a steady income but but to get them to think that they have the option of taking time out and being a full-time dad if they want to and giving them the kinds of choices that we're now giving women which we we used not to and that's a kind of different gender judo but I think we're gonna have to engage it so these guys this is a wonderful book written by two wonderful people go out and have by your book and have them sign it but give them a big round of applause