����Ӱҵ

Bio

Described as having “something approaching rock star status” in her field by��, Joan C. Williams is a scholar of social inequality and a prominent public intellectual. Williams is the author of 12 books and 116 academic articles in law, sociology, psychology, medical and management journals. She is the 11^th��most cited legal scholar both in critical theory and employment law. She is a Sullivan Professor and the Founding Director of the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco, former Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law.

She has three TED/TEDx talks, including one with over 1.3 million views. Her 2016 essay on why Trump attracted so many non-college voters went viral, with over 3.7 million reads, becoming the most-read article in the 90-year history of��. She is widely known for “bias interrupters,”—an evidence-based metrics-driven approach to eradicating implicit bias introduced in the��Harvard Business Review��in 2014. The website������with open-sourced toolkits for individuals and organizations has been accessed over 500,000 times. She was profiled in��and has published on class dynamics in American politics in,,,,,, the��and elsewhere.

Her work on class includes her upcoming book��Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class – And How to Win Them Back��(forthcoming St. Martin’s, May 2025) and her critically acclaimed 2017 book��White Working Class –��one of three books President Biden carried, dog-eared and annotated, during his 2020 presidential campaign, according to the.

Her work on gender includes��What Works for Women at Work:��Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know��(NYU Press, 2014) and her prize-winning��Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It��(Oxford, 1999). Williams’ work helped create the field of work-family studies, modern workplace flexibility policies, and the study of maternal wall bias in sociology.

Her work on race includes eight studies documenting how racial and gender bias play out in today’s workplaces, including two focused specifically on women of color:��Pinning down the Jellyfish:��Racial and Gender Bias against Women in Tech��(2022) and��Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias against Women of Color in STEM��(2014). She is a leading voice on diversity, equity, and inclusion; with her team, she has published 39 articles published in��Harvard Business Review.��In 2014, she launched��Bias Interrupters, a data-driven approach to interrupting bias in organizations whose website has been downloaded over half a million times.

Williams has received awards in several different fields. For her contributions to the legal profession, she is one of the few people to receive both the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award (2012) and the ABA’s Margaret Brent Women Award for Lawyers of Achievement (2006).�� For her contributions to the work-family field, she received the Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute (2014) and MSOM Responsible Research Award in Operations Management (2022). For her contributions to women’s advancement in engineering, she received the President’s Award from the Society of Women Engineers (2019). For contributions to psychology, she received the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology (2005).

Her work has been funded by three National Science Foundation grants, as well as grants from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the W. W. Kellogg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT as well as an honorary PhD from Utrecht ����Ӱҵ in the Netherlands.

Education

• Harvard Law School
  J.D., Law

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  M.A., City Planning

• Yale ����Ӱҵ
  B.A., History

Accomplishments

• Work Life Legacy Award
  Awarded by the Families and Work Institute. 2014

• Visionary Award
  Awarded by The ����Ӱҵ of California College of the Law SF 2013

• Outstanding Scholar Award
  Awarded by the American Bar Foundation. 2012

Selected Scholarship

• Journal of Social Issues 2018

• Annual Review of Psychology 2016

• Journal of Research in Gender Studies 2016

• Harvard Journal of Law & Gender 2014

• Journal of Social Issues 2013

• Harvard Women's Law Journal 2003

• Oxford ����Ӱҵ Press 2000

• Duke Law Journal 1991

• Michigan Law Review (reprinted in Feminist Jurisprudence (Oxford Univ. Press, 1993)) 1989