UC Hastings College of the Law was founded in 1878 as the first law department of the University of California, and today is one of the top-rated law schools in the United States. Our alumni span the globe and are among the most respected lawyers, judges and business leaders today. Our faculty are nationally renowned as both teachers and scholars.

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Outstanding Scholar Award

Awarded by The University of California at Hastings.

Hastings Visionary Award

Awarded by the Families and Work Institute.

Work Life Legacy Award

WorkLife Law : Founding Director

Caregivers in the Courtroom: The Growing Trend of Family Responsibilities Discrimination

The Evolution of 'FReD': Family Responsibilities Discrimination and Developments in the Law of Stereotyping and Implicit Bias

Discrimination Against Mothers is the Strongest Form of Workplace Gender DiscriminationL Lessons from U.S. Caregiver Discrimination Law

The End of Men?: Gender Flux in the Face of Precarious Masculinity

Disruptive Innovation: New Models of Legal Practice

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.  Up-beat, pragmatic, and chock full of advice, What Works for Women at Work is an indispensable guide for working women.

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

 The United States has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world. Despite what is often reported, new mothers don’t “opt out” of work. They are pushed out by discriminating and inflexible workplaces. Today’s workplaces continue to idealize the worker who has someone other than parents caring for their children.   Conventional wisdom attributes women’s decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. In this thought-provoking book, Joan Williams shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men—both those who seek to avoid the breadwinner role and those who embrace it—as well as women. Faced with masculine norms that define the workplace, women must play the tomboy or the femme. Both paths result in a gender bias that is exacerbated when the two groups end up pitted against each other. And although work-family issues long have been seen strictly through a gender lens, we ignore class at our peril. The dysfunctional relationship between the professional-managerial class and the white working class must be addressed before real reform can take root.   Contesting the idea that women need to negotiate better within the family, and redefining the notion of success in the workplace, Williams reinvigorates the work-family debate and offers the first steps to making life manageable for all American families. 

Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization)

In Unbending Gender, Joan Williams takes a hard look at the state of feminism in America.  Concerned by what she finds--young women who flatly refuse to identify themselves as feminists and working-class and minority women who feel the movement hasn't addressed the issues that dominate their daily lives--she outlines a new vision of feminism that calls for workplaces focused on the needs of families and, in divorce cases, recognition of the value of family work and its impact on women's earning power.   Williams shows that workplaces are designed around men's bodies and life patterns in ways that discriminate against women, and that the work/family system that results is terrible for men, worse for women, and worst of all for children. She proposes a set of practical policies and legal initiatives to reorganize the two realms of work in employment and households--so that men and women can lead healthier and more productive personal and work lives. Williams introduces a new 'reconstructive' feminism that places class, race, and gender conflicts among women at center stage. Her solution is an inclusive, family-friendly feminism that supports both mothers and fathers as caregivers and as workers.

Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It

Part-time schedules and professional success do not have to be mutually exclusive.  Strategic career moves and careful avoidance of common obstacles can lead reduced-hours lawyers to the top of the legal profession.  Drawing on lessons learned from a decade of the Project for Attorney Retention’s research and work with successful part-time lawyers, this book provides step-by-step directions for proactively managing a part-time career toward advancement and financial rewards.  Topics covered include how to plan and negotiate a reduced-hours schedule, tools for making the schedule work, overcoming hidden bias against reduced-hours lawyers, and positioning one’s career for advancement.  Examples, tools and tips are included throughout, such as a planning worksheet, conversation starters, sample agreement, and practical solutions for addressing bias.

Flex Success: The Lawyer's Guide to Balanced Hours

Dissatisfaction with work/life balance has been documented as a major reason lawyers leave their firms, and many lawyers cite the lack of viable, non-stigmatized balanced hours options as a significant factor. This book -- addressed primarily to law firm managers, administrators, and human resources professionals -- presents the business case for balanced hours programs; describes methods of analyzing the effectiveness of current part-time programs; and provides clear advice on implementation of a balanced hours program. Appendices include a model balanced hours policy, an attrition cost worksheet, and a checklist for attorneys considering a balanced hours schedule.

Solving the Part-Time Puzzle: The Law Firm's Guide to Balanced Hours

Described as having "something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams has played a central role in reshaping the conversation about work, gender, and class over the past quarter century. Williams is a Distinguished Professor of Law, Hastings Foundation Chair, and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Williams’ path-breaking work helped create the field of work-family studies and modern workplace flexibility policies. 

Williams’ 2014 book What Works for Women at Work (co-written with daughter Rachel Dempsey) was praised by The New York Times Book Review: “Deftly combining sociological research with a more casual narrative style, What Works for Women at Work offers unabashedly straightforward advice in a how-to primer for ambitious women.” Following its success, Sheryl Sandberg and LeanIn.org asked Joan to create short videos sharing the strategies discussed in the book. The videos have been downloaded over 975,000 times and are featured by Virgin Airlines as in-flight entertainment, seen literally around the world. Most recently, Williams co-authored a workbook companion to What Works for Women at Work, available now from NYU Press. 

Williams founded Gender Bias Bingo, a web-based project aimed at providing information and tools on gender bias to professors. Williams has explored the parallels and differences between gender and racial bias in two reports. The first, “Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias Against Women in Science” has been shared over 40,000 times in the media, and the second, “Climate Control? Gender and Racial Bias in Engineering” was co-authored by the Society for Women Engineers and surveyed over 3,000 engineers. 

Williams is one of the 10 most cited scholars in her field. She has authored 11 books, over 90 academic articles, and her work has been covered in publications from Oprah Magazine to The Atlantic. Her awards include the Families and Work Institute’s Work Life Legacy Award (2014), the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award (2012), and the ABA’s Margaret Brent Women Award for Lawyers of Achievement (2006). In 2008, she gave the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard. Her Harvard Business Review article, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class” has been read over 3.7 million times and is now the most read article in HBR’s 90-plus year history.

Property Law

Feminist Legal Theory

Work Life Balance

Gender and Sexuality in the Law

Work Conflict

Publications

Blog

Center for WorkLife Law

Huffington Post Blog

Curriculum Vitae

Planning Maternity or Paternity Leave: A Professional's Guide

How to Make Your Company Less Sexist and Racist

The 5 Biases Pushing Women Out of STEM

Win or Lose, Discrimination Suit Has an Effect on Silicon Valley

The Throwback Sexism of Kleiner Perkins

What Works for Women at Work: How to Spit Subtle Bias, and How to Eliminate It

Managing Department Climate Change

Work-Family Conflict and What To Do About It

Want a Great Work/Life Balance? Go for It: Individual and Institutional Solutions

Keynote Speaker

Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Hastings Foundation Chair and Director of the Center for WorkLife Law

"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," writes...

UC Hastings Chancellor & Dean Frank H. Wu talks with Professor Joan C. Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Hastings Foundation Chair, and Director of the Center for WorkLife Law. ...

The Flexibility Stigma: Fiat Justitia with Joan C. Williams

They're characterized as obstacles to success. Four key patterns that happen in the workplace, influencing how women are perceived, how they compete, and how they perform. Author Joan C. Williams ...

Joan C. Williams: Navigating Gender Bias

Joan C. Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Hastings Foundation Chair and Director of the Center for WorkLife Law, gave the keynote address at the American Bar Foundation's 2014 ...

Joan C. Williams on Gender and Salary Negotiation - Excerpt

Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California's Hastings College of Law, and Bloomberg News reporter Dawn Kopecki talk with Mark Crumpton and Julie Hyman...

Williams Sees `Series of Hurdles' for Wall Street Women: Video

Lunch Address Joan C. Williams, University of California-Hastings College of Law About the Conference: Friday, October 12 & Saturday, October 13, 2012 Boston University School of Law "The...

Lunch Address (Evaluating Claims about "the End of Men" Conference)

Gender and work-family issues expert Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law and 1066 Foundation Chair at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, discusses the four basic...

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