It's Not You It's the Workplace
Women's Conflict at Work and the Bias that Built It
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
Sliver award winner in Women/Minorities in Business category, 2020 Axiom Business Book Awards
It's not you, It's the Workplace offers a fresh approach to understanding why women's relationships with other women at work are often fraught and when they are, have the potential to completely derail women's careers. It's a pervasive and complicated issue which, until now, has been falsely represented by books that paint women as inherently bitchy back-stabbers who cannot help but have challenging relationships with other women. As the authors prove, this is patently untrue! Immensely practical, the book features real-world advice and tactics to overcome and avoid workplace conflict, and most-importantly, build on the positive aspects of women to women relationships, developing stronger networks that foster women's career success and creating a more supportive and satisfying work environment.
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.
