Episode 75: Joan Williams on Navigating Gender Bias Preferences in the Workplace
Do women in STEM have to prove themselves more than men do? Are office politics more complicated for women than men? How does motherhood affect women engineers?
In this SWE Diverse episode, FY19 SWE President Cindy Hoover speaks with WE19 Mega Session speaker Joan Williams about her research in bias patterns, and how we can navigate those gender bias patterns in our own lives and careers. Joan is a Distinguished Law Professor and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She has authored 11 books and over 90 academic articles and book chapters, and ranks among the top 10 scholars in her field. She has played a central role in reshaping the debates over women, work, and unconscious bias over the past quarter-century, and is widely known for her “bias interrupters,”—a new, evidence-based, metrics-driven approach to eradicating implicit bias.
“[Our research shows that] women in STEM have to prove themselves more than men do. Our data from the US showed that about 1/3 of white men—white male engineers—felt they had to prove themselves more than their colleagues, but about 2/3 of women did, and about 2/3 people of color did. So that’s attitudinal data, but it’s matched my almost 40 years of studies. This “Prove It Again” pattern is very strong; it has been documented both by objective data in the lab, and it has also been documented by people who are seeing it in the workplace.”
– Joan Williams, Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California, Hastings College of the Law
Check out more SWE podcasts:
- Episode 74: Is it Time for a Career Change?
- Episode 73: The Future of the Engineering Workforce with Sarah Watzman
- Episode 72: Kim Varga on Using Disruption to Advance Your Career
- Episode 71: WE19 Keynote and Disney Engineer, Rachel Hutter
- Episodes 69 & 70: One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Woman Engineering Kind
- Episode 68: From Serbia to U.S. Academia, NYU Tandon’s First Female Dean
- Episode 67: Penny Passes the Torch to New President Cindy Hoover
- Episode 66: “The Change Starts with Me” — An Aerospace Engineer with Dreams of Greater D&I
- Episode 65: Dean Ropella on Changing the Face of Engineering
- Episode 64: The Experience of Being an Asian American Female Engineer
Browse through all of our SWE podcasts on SWE’s SoundCloud.
