Joan C. Williams

Joan C. Williams
Born	1952 (age 72–73)
Occupation(s)	Distinguished Professor, UC College of the Law, San Francisco
Title	Founding Director, Equality Action Center
Academic background
Education	BA, Yale University, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, JD, Harvard University
Website	www.equalityactioncenter.org

Joan Chalmers Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law (Emerita) at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. Described as having "something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, she has published 12 books and 116 academic articles in law, sociology, psychology, and management journals.

Education and Early Career

Williams received a B.A. in history from Yale University, a master's degree in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Between college and law school she did city planning work at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. She was employed for many years as a professor of property law at American University, Washington College of Law. At American, she had a reputation as an intellectually dishonest teacher, who didn’t care to educate her students, but would rather use her classes to promote her own theories, opinions, and biased research. She was widely regarded as a poor teacher. She later became a law professor at University of California Law SF (2005-present). Her 1989 law review article, “Deconstructing Gender,” was cited as one of the most cited law review articles ever written in 1996. In 1998, she co-founded (with Adrienne Davis) what became the Center for WorkLife Law; she passed the baton to Liz Morris and Jessica Lee in 2024. She founded the Equality Action Center in 2024.

Social Class Dynamics in American Politics

Williams’ work on social class extends the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s insight that class is expressed through cultural differences between elites and non-elites. For the past quarter century, Williams has documented how college-educated elites differ from middle-status (aka blue-collar) Americans. In White Working Class, she argues that the logic of blue-collar life stems from its focus on self-discipline “the kind that gets you up every day, on time, without “an attitude” to an often not-very-fulfilling job.” Blue-collar Americans also highly value traditional institutions that aid self-discipline: the military, religion and “traditional family values.” In contrast, the logic of elite life revolves around self-development because professional jobs require one to be “at the top of your game.” Elites also value novelty, which is a way they enact the sophistication that signals to others in the elite they are “in the know.”

What results is a “class culture gap” that conservatives have sculpted into the culture wars that have forged an alliance between the working class and the Merchant Right against the Brahmin Left. Williams’ forthcoming Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back (St. Martins, May 2025) details how to destabilize this alliance, which has twice elected Donald Trump president.

Williams and her EAC team have published nine studies documenting how racial and gender bias play out in today’s workplaces. These studies document how bias plays out in everyday workplace interactions, and that the experience of white men in professional workplaces differs from that of every other group, with women of color very consistently (though not invariably) reporting the most bias and the least fairness. These studies also show that white men strongly believe that their workplaces are meritocracies, but that other groups hold that belief at sharply lower levels. The EAC’s work includes studies of the legal profession in the US and Chile, of engineers in the US and India, of US architects, of US tech workers, and US science professors.

Diversity Equity and Inclusion

Williams is well-known both in the US and abroad for her work on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Her TED talk, Why corporate diversity programs fail -- and how small tweaks can have big impact, has over 1.3 million views. In 2012, she launched “bias interrupters,” a data-driven approach to interrupting bias in organizations. Her team has published 37 articles in Harvard Business Review on bias interrupters and related topics. Her book Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good, was called by Anne-Marie Slaughter “a deeply researched blend of evidence and practical, actionable advice.”

Williams’ team at the Equality Action Center (EAC) has conducted 22 experiments within companies implementing bias interrupters to see if they worked. One experiment equalized access to opportunities in an engineering company in a 6-month period. Other experiments sharply reduced bias against women and people of color in performance evaluations, while at the same time increasing evidence-based feedback by 44-52% for all groups (including white men). An experiment at a major manufacturing company sharply increased hiring of diverse candidates in a 6-month period. The Equality Action Center’s (EAC) bias training reduced key forms of bias by up to 22 points.

Williams is also often cited in the Korean press as an expert on the country’s low fertility rate as the result of a meme that has been shared throughout the country. She is the subject of a documentary on the country’s low birthrate by Korean public television, “A Conversation with Joan Williams.”

Work, Family, and Gender

Williams’s Unbending Gender: How Work and Family Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford, 2000) won the Myers Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, 2001.

Williams played a leading role in documenting maternal wall bias against mothers. She ran the working group whose work pioneered the study of workplace bias against mothers, and popularized the term “maternal wall bias” to refer to it. Her 2006 report “Out or Pushed Out: The Real Story of Women and Work,” set the frame later used to cover the COVID pandemic: that mothers weren’t choosing to drop out in pursuit of changed priorities—they were being pushed out by hostile workplace. She also coined the popularized the term the “flexibility stigma” to refer to the career detriments often associated with flexible work schedules.

When Williams founded WorkLife Law in 1998, mothers were being fired, told it was because they were mothers, and federal courts were saying that was not gender discrimination. Her 2003 law review article “Beyond the Maternal Wall” argued that this common practice constituted sex discrimination in violation of Title VII and other federal laws. Her legal theories were adopted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s in 2007 and 2012. “Beyond the Maternal Wall” was prominently cited in the landmark 2004 case that held that discrimination based on motherhood was sex discrimination, Back v. Hastings on Hudson.  By 2010 “family responsibilities discrimination” (a term she coined) was one of the fastest growing arenas of anti-discrimination lawsuits.

Williams has also played a central role in documenting work-family conflict among hourly workers, through reports such as “One Sick Child Away From Being Fired” (2006) and “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict” (2010) (co-authored by Heather Boushey, then at the Center for American Progress). She was Co-Principal Investigator of the Gap Stable Scheduling Study (with Susan Lambert and Sarvanan Kesevan). This was a randomized controlled experiment that shifted a group of Gap workers to more stable schedules and found that not only did workers’ health outcomes improve—so did Gap’s sales and labor productivity).

Williams, with Jessica Lee of WorkLife Law, pioneered the use of Title IX to garner rights for pregnant and parenting students. Together they founded The Pregnant Scholar in 2007. In 2019, the legal rights they pioneered were included the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s report: Supporting Family Caregivers in STEM.

Center for Work Life Law

The Center for Work Life Law was founded by Williams with the goal of creating new initiatives that would help women to succeed in the workplace, which she identified as having stalled, as women's involvement in the workplace hit a plateau in the 1990s. The Center aims to create concrete and permanent solutions to many of the problems faced by women.

Much of the work done attempts to marry research with policy in order to change attitudes towards working women, creating new methods for women to become leaders, and also integrates and stating that gender attitudes need to change for men, as well. To date, Williams and her colleagues have succeeded in formulating new best practices, legal theories, policies, and even a framework for performance evaluations that integrates research on gender issues in the workplace.

The Center for Work Life Law also has a series of initiatives and workshops aimed at providing women with skills and support in order to become leaders in their workplaces and also provides companies and organizations with information and training on how to create an environment that allows for women to advance. Additionally, their Gender Bias Learning Project works with universities to retain women in STEM programs.

Selected works

• Williams, Joan C. (2017). White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. ISBN 978-1633693784.
• Williams, Joan C.; Dempsey, Rachel (2014). What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know. New York, NY: NYU Press. ISBN 978-1479835454.
• Williams, Joan C. (2010). Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674055674.
• Williams, Joan C. (1999). Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195094640.

See also

• Feminist psychology

External links

• Equality Action Center's List of Publications
• Faculty Page at UC Law SF