It's Not You, It's the Workplace
Women's Conflict at Work and the Bias that Built it
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
Why is it that many women believe that working with other women is harder than working with men? A clue: it's not because women actually are harder to work with.
After decades of working to help women to succeed at work, Andie Kramer and Al Harris noticed the same thing over and over again: Women's relationships with other women are causing conflict in the workplace and this is hindering careers across the board.
Their research demonstrates that at the root of these clashes lie stereotypes, toxic assumptions and societal expectations about how women should behave. Through extensive research and hundreds of interviews, Andie and Al have identified the most fraught scenarios of women working for, working with, supervising, and collaborating with other women.
It's Not You, It's the Workplace provides practical, immediately usable techniques that will allow women to develop strong networks that will foster their career success and organizations to structure their policies and practices - unlocking the potential of women in team situations. The companies that succeed in the future will be those where bias no longer blocks women's career satisfaction or advancement to leadership.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A badly needed rejoinder to a tired stereotype arrives from married couple and attorneys Kramer and Harris. A persistent cultural meme insists that the greatest threat to professional women is other women backstabbing, conniving "queen bees" and "mean girls." Hogwash, say the coauthors, who investigated these stereotypes using surveys, social science research, and interviews. Conclusion: there's no evidence that there's more conflict at the office between women than there is between men or between different genders. To address this misconception, Harris and Kramer reframe the issue, showing that it's not about how women behave, but about the structure of workplaces, which tend to make female employees feel like outliers. In fact, the authors report, women tend to be much more concerned about their intragender workplace relationships, and thus, more distressed when conflict occurs. Bringing in relevant insights from intersectionality theory, Harris and Kramer discuss how to have better conversations about "identity biases," such as those that might involve race or sexual orientation, with one tip being to remember that "your aim should be to understand, not to demonstrate you are a good person." The cumulative result of their work is a refreshing, well-timed rebuttal to a hackneyed old fiction that blames individual women for the institutional biases they face.