What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know

Foreword

xiii Foreword anne-marie slaughter Foreword by Anne-Marie Slaughter Joan C. Williams and Rachel Dempsey, mother and daughter, have written a book that every working woman should read. it is also a book that every man who works with women should read. if women act on the prescriptions in these pages and men begin to understand the deep culturally embedded biases and assumptions that mean a book like this still needs to be written, the workplace will be a better place, the united States will be more competitive , and the intertwining of work and family life will be easier for all caregivers. What Works for Women at Work is a project by the new girls’ network, an all-star list of “Fortune 500 executives, entrepreneurs , bestselling writers, partners at major consulting firms, and rainmakers at some of the biggest law firms in the world” that Joan C. Williams, a law professor, put together. these women are not representative of the entire female American workforce, in either class or racial or ethnic terms, but they do include women of color, who face what Joan and Rachel call the “double jeopardy” of race and gender discrimination and have their own distinct tales to tell. Above all, these women are the face of female success. yet all these women, and frankly every woman i know who has ever worked in either a paid or volunteer capacity, recognize the xiv • Foreword by Anne-Marie Slaughter four patterns of behavior that create the primary obstacles to women ’s advancement to leadership positions across every industry: 1. Prove-it-Again! 2. the tightrope 3. the Maternal Wall 4. tug of War i am part of the first generation of women who were actually advantaged, at least in some circumstances, by our gender, thanks to the sacrifices and drive of the women a generation ahead of me —women like Joan C. Williams. by the time we entered the labor force in the late 1980s and early 1990s, university faculties, law firms, businesses, and government agencies were actively looking for women. the women they hired had to meet the same hiring criteria that men did, but if they were above the bar, they often had a leg up on their male colleagues, at least at the outset. in my own case, all-male law faculties were starting to look for women when i went on the law-teaching market in 1990; 20 years later, hillary Clinton wanted to break the glass ceiling at the Policy Planning office, which was a “big think” job that no woman had ever even been considered for. but even if overt gender discrimination has decreased dramatically , and women in the middle class are starting to outearn and rise higher than their mates, these four patterns ring so true, not for entering the workforce but during the ascent to leadership positions. We have all seen women held to higher standards of performance while male colleagues are given the benefit of the doubt for slipups and promoted on potential, the core of the “Prove-itAgain !” pattern. We have all seen women who are criticized for being too assertive when they act like men and too passive if they act like (traditional) women, which Joan and Rachel call “the tightrope.” toward the end of my two years in government, when lots of jobs were turning over at the midpoint of the administration , i and other women i worked with tried to ensure that women Foreword by Anne-Marie Slaughter • xv candidates were considered for promotion. over and over again, i would hear, “She’s smart and has gotten a lot of things done, but she has sharp elbows.” “Sharp elbows” is code for “she insisted on pushing her point or her position and won the day,” behavior that in a man would be lauded. Many of us live with the third pattern: “the Maternal Wall.” every time someone says, “Women today can do everything that men can do,” the response should be, “yes, absolutely, as long as they don’t have children.” Far too many women are still being asked to make significant trade-offs between their careers and their families, but when was the last time you or anyone else asked a man how he was going to manage his career once he had children? the final pattern is the “tug of War,” in which women judge each other in ways that...