Women And Work

With #metoo dominating headlines and an unprecedented number of women running for office, the fight for women’s equality has perhaps never been higher on the political agenda. Around the world, women are fighting against unfair working conditions, restrictive abortion Laws, and the frayed social safety net. The same holds true within the business world—but there’s a twist: even as some women argue that pushing for more female CEOs would help the struggle for equality, other activists argue that CEOs themselves are part of the problem, regardless of gender. In Feminist Thinking about Work, Susan Ferguson explores the history of feminist discourse, examining the ways in which feminists have conceptualized women’s work and placed labor, and its reproduction, at the heart of their program for emancipation. Engaging with feminist critiques of work, Ferguson argues that women’s emancipation depends upon a reorganization and radical reimagining of all labor, and advocates for an inclusive politics that reconceptualizes women’s work and work in general.

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.

"A fascinating history of…[a craft] that preceded and made possible civilization itself." —New York Times Book Review New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women's unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies. Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture. Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods—methods she herself helped to fashion. In a "brilliantly original book" (Katha Pollitt, Washington Post Book World), she argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.

Many common assumptions about work are challenged in this book. For example, the findings refute the common assertion that work tasks can be categorized into ‘“instrumental,” or task activities, versus “caretaking,” or people-oriented activities. It is shown that, regardless of the type of job, tasks are accomplished through the management of relationships. Other findings show that workers devise ingenious methods for maintaining dignity in the face of blatant oppression, a conclusion neglected in traditional studies of work where prestige hierarchies are presumed to affect workers’ feelings about themselves. This book integrates findings from qualitative studies of women’s work experiences in 13 occupations. The methods for gathering the data include participant observation, unstructured interviews, analysis of diaries, and review of historical documents. These methodologies permit unanticipated patterns to emerge from the data. Hence, The Worth of Women’s Work not only presents new insights into women’s work experiences, but simultaneously takes a much-needed step in developing a framework for integrating qualitative research.

Women at Work presents the field of rhetorical studies with fifteen chapters that center on gender, rhetoric, and work in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist scholars explore women’s labor evangelism in the textile industry, the rhetorical constructions of leadership within women’s trade unions, the rhetorical branding of a twentieth-century female athlete, the labor activism of an African American blues singer, and the romantic, same-sex collaborations that supported pedagogical labor. Women at Work also introduces readers to rhetorical methods and approaches possible for the study of gender and work. Contributors name and explore a specific rhetorical concern that animates their study and in so doing, readers learn about such concepts as professional proof, rhetorical failure, epideictic embodiment, rhetorics of care, and cross-racial coalition building.

The essays in Indigenous Women and Work create a transnational and comparative dialogue on the history of the productive and reproductive lives and circumstances of Indigenous women from the late nineteenth century to the present in the United States, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Canada. Surveying the spectrum of Indigenous women's lives and circumstances as workers, both waged and unwaged, the contributors offer varied perspectives on the ways women's work has contributed to the survival of communities in the face of ongoing tensions between assimilation and colonization. They also interpret how individual nations have conceived of Indigenous women as workers and, in turn, convert these assumptions and definitions into policy and practice. The essays address the intersection of Indigenous, women's, and labor history, but will also be useful to contemporary policy makers, tribal activists, and Native American women's advocacy associations. Contributors are Tracey Banivanua Mar, Marlene Brant Castellano, Cathleen D. Cahill, Brenda J. Child, Sherry Farrell Racette, Chris Friday, Aroha Harris, Faye HeavyShield, Heather A. Howard, Margaret D. Jacobs, Alice Littlefield, Cybèle Locke, Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Kathy M'Closkey, Colleen O'Neill, Beth H. Piatote, Susan Roy, Lynette Russell, Joan Sangster, Ruth Taylor, and Carol Williams.

A Wall Street Journal and Washington Post Bestseller, Own It is a new kind of career playbook for a new era of feminism, offering women a new set of rules for professional success: one that plays to their strengths and builds on the power they already have. Weren’t women supposed to have “arrived”? Perhaps with the nation’s first female President, equal pay on the horizon, true diversity in the workplace to come thereafter? Or, at least the end of “fat-shaming” and “locker room talk”? Well, we aren’t quite there yet. But does that mean that progress for women in business has come to a screeching halt? It’s true that the old rules didn’t get us as far as we hoped. But we can go the distance, and we can close the gaps that still exist. We just need a new way. In fact, there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future, says former Wall Street powerhouse-turned-entrepreneur Sallie Krawcheck. That’s because the business world is changing fast –driven largely by technology - and it’s changing in ways that give us more power and opportunities than ever…and even more than we yet realize. Success for professional women will no longer be about trying to compete at the men’s version of the game, she says. And it will no longer be about contorting ourselves to men’s expectations of how powerful people behave. Instead, it’s about embracing and investing in our innate strengths as women - and bringing them proudly and unapologetically, to work. When we do, she says, we gain the power to advance in our careers in more natural ways. We gain the power to initiate courageous conversations in the workplace. We gain the power to forge non-traditional career paths; to leave companies that don’t respect our worth, and instead, go start our own. And we gain the power to invest our economic muscle in making our lives, and the world, better. Here Krawcheck draws on her experiences at the highest levels of business, both as one of the few women at the top rungs of the biggest boy’s club in the world, and as an entrepreneur, to show women how to seize this seismic shift in power to take their careers to the next level. This change is real, and it’s coming fast. It’s time to own it.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Ivanka is donating the unpaid portion of her advance and all future royalties received from Women Who Work to the Ivanka M. Trump Charitable Fund, a donor advised fund that will make grants to organizations that empower and educate women and girls.* "This is a chatty step-by-step guide to living a happy life and getting ahead in a career." —USA Today "The advice is spot-on for everyone, not just women." —Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and author of Delivering Happiness I believe that when it comes to women and work, there isn’t one right answer. The only person who can create a life you’ll love is you. Our grandmothers fought for the right to work. Our mothers fought for the choice to be in an office or to stay at home. Our generation is the first to fully embrace and celebrate the fact that our lives are multidimensional. Thanks to the women who came before us and paved the way, we can create the lives we want to lead—which look different for each of us. I’ve been fortunate to be able to build my career around my passions, from real estate to fashion. But my professional titles only begin to describe who I am and what I value. I have been an executive and an entrepreneur, but also—and just as importantly—a wife, mother, daughter, and friend. To me, “work” encompasses my efforts to succeed in all of these areas. After appearing on The Apprentice years ago and receiving a flood of letters from young women asking for guidance, I realized the need for more female leaders to speak out publicly in order to change the way society thinks and talks about “women who work.” So I created a forum to do just that. This book evolves the conversation that started on IvankaTrump.com, where so many incredible women (and men!) have shared their experiences, advice, ambitions, and passions. Women who work lead meetings and train for marathons. We learn how to cook and how to code. We inspire our employees and our children. We innovate at our current jobs and start new businesses. Women Who Work will equip you with the best skills I’ve learned from some of the amazing people I’ve met, on subjects such as identifying opportunities, shifting careers smoothly, negotiating, leading teams, starting companies, managing work and family, and helping change the system to make it better for women—now and in the future. I hope it will inspire you to redefine success and architect a life that honors your individual passions and priorities, in a way only you can. * The Ivanka M. Trump Charitable Fund (the “Fund”) is a donor advised fund that supports the economic empowerment of women and girls. Ivanka Trump is the grant advisor to the Fund and sole member of IT WWW Pub, LLC (the “LLC”), which receives royalties from the publication of Women Who Work. The LLC will contribute a minimum $425,000 to the Fund, which is the unpaid portion of the advance, net of expenses. In addition, the LLC will contribute all future royalties it receives that are in excess of the advance to the Fund during the period from May 1, 2017 to May 1, 2022.