Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good

A cutting-edge, relentless, objective approach to inclusion.

Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about privilege. That's not enough. To truly make progress we need to stop celebrating the problem and instead take effective steps to solve it.

In Bias Interrupted, Joan C. Williams shows how it's done, and, reassuringly, how easy it is to get started. One of today's preeminent voices on inclusive workplaces, Williams explains how leaders can use standard business tools—data, metrics, and persistence—to interrupt the bias that is continually transmitted through formal systems like performance appraisals, as well as the informal systems that control access to career-enhancing opportunities. The book presents fresh evidence, based on Williams's exhaustive research and work with companies, that interrupting bias helps every group—including white men.

Comprehensive, though compact and straightforward, Bias Interrupted delivers real, practical value in an efficient and accessible manner to an audience that has never needed it more. It's possible to interrupt bias. Here's where you start.

Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law, Hastings Foundation Chair and Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings Law. Described as having something approaching rock star status in her field by the New York Times Magazine, she has played a central role in debates over workplace bias for decades. She has received prestigious honors in several different fields, including academia (Massey Lectures in American Civilization at Harvard), legal (both the Margaret Brent Prize for Women Lawyers of Achievement and the American Bar Foundation's Outstanding Scholar Award), engineering (the Society of Women Engineers President's Award), and psychology (an honorary degree, and the Distinguished Publication Award of the Association of Women in Psychology). Her 2014 co-written book What Works for Women at Work was praised by the New York Times Book Review as deftly combining sociological research with a more casual narrative style...[that] offers unabashedly straightforward advice in a how-to primer for ambitious women. Her 2017 book White Working Class was called by the Washington Post a good-faith effort at cultural and class introspection.

You can find Joan C. Williams at:
biasinterrupted.org
joancwilliams.com