Presents a toolkit for getting ahead in today's workplace.

Up-beat, pragmatic, and chock full of advice, What Works for Women at Work is an indispensable guide for working women.
An essential resource for any working woman, What Works for Women at Work is a comprehensive and insightful guide for mastering office politics as a woman. Authored by Joan C. Williams, one of the nation’s most-cited experts on women and work, and her daughter, writer Rachel Dempsey, this unique book offers a multi-generational perspective into the realities of today’s workplace. Often women receive messages that they have only themselves to blame for failing to get ahead—Negotiate more! Stop being such a wimp! Stop being such a witch! What Works for Women at Work tells women it’s not their fault. The simple fact is that office politics often benefits men over women. Based on interviews with 127 successful working women, over half of them women of color, What Works for Women at Work presents a toolkit for getting ahead in today’s workplace. Distilling over 35 years of research, Williams and Dempsey offer four crisp patterns that affect working women: Prove-It-Again!, the Tightrope, the Maternal Wall, and the Tug of War. Each represents different challenges and requires different strategies—which is why women need to be savvier than men to survive and thrive in high-powered careers. Williams and Dempsey’s analysis of working women is nuanced and in-depth, going far beyond the traditional cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approaches of most career guides for women. Throughout the book, they weave real-life anecdotes from the women they interviewed, along with quick kernels of advice like a “New Girl Action Plan,” ways to “Take Care of Yourself”, and even “Comeback Lines” for dealing with sexual harassment and other difficult situations.

"[The book] identifies four overall patterns of gender bias that high-achieving career women face." - Black Voice News

"Deftly combining sociological research with a more casual narrative style, What Works for Women at Workoffers unabashedly straightforward advice in a how-to primer for ambitious women....The authors plow nimbly through decades of research, transforming what could have been dry and impenetrable statistics into attention-grabbing revelations." - The New York Times Book Review

"Forty years later, gender bias shouldnt exist in the workplace, but it does, in large part because many of us dont recognize its most common forms. Thats a pitfalland for me, at least, a pratfall. ReadingWhat Works for Women at Work would be a good first step in avoiding both." - Strategy and Business

"In their compelling new book, Williams (Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law) and Dempsey (a student at Yale Law School who blogs for Huffington Poston women's issues) spell out the two sets of rules, higher standards and closed doors that many women encounter on the job these days." - Forbes

"Much of its advice is solid career counsel for anyone looking to move up...ultimately the tone of this book is quite hopeful...[T]his book's message: If we make ourselves and the men in our lives aware of the roadblocks women still face, and we use some of the many tools the authors offer in this volume, we are likely to see women move ahead more quickly. In fact I wish there were a way to interest men in reading this book. They would get the most out of it." - Forbes.com

"The book offers women advice for asking for promotions or pay raises, while acknowledging that women who ask for these things can be considered masculine in ways that might undermine their success. I particularly appreciated reading about the toxic competition between women at work that can also hinder the success of women collectively." - Salon.com

"The book's plentiful examples and suggestions provide smart strategies for federal workers to find work/life balance without calling their commitment to career into question." - The Business of Federal Technology

"Written by a mother-daughter duo, this decidedly unwonky examination of gender bias doubles as a playbook on how to transcend and triumph." - O, The Oprah Magazine

"This title is many steps beyondLean In(2013), Sheryl Sandbergs prescription for getting ahead in business.What Works for Women at Workis filled with street-smart advice and plain old savvy about the way life works in corporate America." - STARRED Booklist

"Its great to have a smart compilation of helpful suggestions put together not by two self-help gurus but by two women who understand that all their advice might still not be enough. Besides, make no mistake: the guidance they offer is often quite good, and I suspect few women will not find either a strategy theyve successfully used in the past or one they can utilize in the future within its pages. [] It pretty much sums up what happens to all too many women today." - Women's Review of Books

"The insights from cognitive psychology and social psychology, and the tips gleaned from experience, that this book brings to bear on experiences of gender in the workplace are worth learning." - Feminist Economics

"The book offers an accessible and sound model of problems faced by women climbing the corporate ladder, and presents clear strategies to take while waiting for business to catch up." - Publishers Weekly