Details, and offers vignettes to illustrate, how patriarchy and white supremacy have restricted Black women at work, both historically and currently. Around water coolers and over glasses of wine, Black women come together and process the ways in which their labor is taken for granted and their excellence called into question. Black Women at Work: On Refusal and Recovery makes the direct connection between these contemporary experiences and the long legacy of Black labor exploitation. Through the trafficking and enslavement of Africans, European Americans laid the inhumane foundation of their present-day wealth and privilege and established oppressive labor dynamics for workers that persist to this day. In Black Women at Work, Wendi S. Williams moves the conversation beyond the stubborn audacity of inequity, focusing instead on the powerful history and example of Black women's labor and refusal practices and on the potent role that choice and voice can play in dismantling seemingly impenetrable systems of unfairness. Through the interweaving of personal narratives and social media reflections, Williams crafts a larger narrative of recovery and refusal that articulates a liberatory path toward recovery and reclamation through refusal-a path that will ultimately help to bring us all closer to freedom.

One of Choice magazine's Outstanding Academic Books of 1999 Accepted wisdom about the opportunities available to African American and Latina women in the U.S. labor market has changed dramatically. Although the 1970s saw these women earning almost as much as their white counterparts, in the 1980s their relative wages began falling behind, and the job prospects plummeted for those with little education and low skills. At the same time, African American women more often found themselves the sole support of their families. While much social science research has centered on the problems facing black male workers, Latinas and African American Women at Work offers a comprehensive investigation into the eroding progress of these women in the U.S. labor market. The prominent sociologists and economists featured in this volume describe how race and gender intersect to especially disadvantage black and Latina women. Their inquiries encompass three decades of change for women at all levels of the workforce, from those who spend time on the welfare rolls to middle class professionals. Among the many possible sources of increased disadvantage, they particularly examine the changing demands for skills, increasing numbers of immigrants in the job market, the precariousness of balancing work and childcare responsibilities, and employer discrimination. While racial inequity in hiring often results from educational differences between white and minority women, this cannot explain the discrimination faced by women with higher skills. Minority women therefore face a two-tiered hurdle based on race and gender. Although the picture for young African American women has grown bleaker overall, for Latina women, the story is more complex, with a range of economic outcomes among Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Central and South Americans. Latinas and African American Women at Work reveals differences in how professional African American and white women view their position in the workforce, with black women perceiving more discrimination, for both race and gender, than whites. The volume concludes with essays that synthesize the evidence about racial and gender-based obstacles in the labor market. Given the current heated controversy over female and minority employment, as well as the recent sweeping changes to the national welfare system, the need for empirical data to inform the public debate about disadvantaged women is greater than ever before. The important findings in Latinas and African American Women at Work substantially advance our understanding of social inequality and the pervasive role of race, ethnicity and gender in the economic well-being of American women.

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.

A mother-daughter legal scholar team “offers unabashedly straightforward advice in a how-to primer for ambitious women . . . [A]ttention-grabbing revelations” (Debora L. Spar, The New York Times Book Review) 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, 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. What Works for Women at Work tells women it’s not their fault. 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 thirty-five years of research, Williams and Dempsey offer four crisp patterns that affect working women. 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 beyond the traditional 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 advice on dealing with difficult situations such as sexual harassment. An essential resource for any working woman. “Many steps beyond Lean In (2013), Sheryl Sandberg’s prescription for getting ahead . . . .[F]illed with street-smart advice and plain old savvy about the way life works in corporate America.” —Booklist, starred review) “A playbook on how to transcend and triumph.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

Based on interviews and archival research, this book explores how media is implicated in Black women’s lives in Britain. From accounts of twentieth-century activism and television representations, to experiences of YouTube and Twitter, Sobande's analysis traverses tensions between digital culture’s communal, counter-cultural and commercial qualities. Chapters 2 and 4 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Women of all racial\ethnic backrounds and minority men have been hailed as the major beneficiaries of the expansion in political, economic, and employment opportunities of the 1960s and 1970s. The author uses data derived from a twenty year span of census material to provide a thorough analysis of gender and race segregation throughout the professional occupations in the U.S. during this period of massive social change. She makes clear the advances achieved by all groups-men and women, black and white-during this period of economic expansion, as well as insightfully evaluating the differential advantage of white men against all other race/gender groups. At the same time, Professor Sokoloff provides compelling evidence challenging several myths, such as that of the two-fer myth, whereby black women are said to benefit two-fold from their race and gender statuses from affirmative action.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, women made up 46.4 percent of the civilian labor force in 2005, and that percentage is expected to reach 47 percent by 2014. Professional and health-related occupations are the fastest-growing roles for women, with computer-related, environmental, and educational fields also drawing increasingly on the female workforce. The bottom line at a macro level is that, more and more, women are driving the country's economic development. But with that phenomenon come questions, challenges, and concerns, on many diverse levels. Debates rage on psychological topics such as the effect the increasing number of women at work has on marriage and divorce, family and children, women's identities and stress levels and, overall, their physical and mental health. Psychologist Michele A. Paludi and her team of experts from across fields examine all aspects of women at work - the pros and cons, how it is changing American society, its women, their relationships, partners, and children. The factors that fuel women achievers are also discussed by female scholars and experts in the field, who illustrate points with vignettes and their own career development stories. Issues in the workplace affecting women's wellbeing are also discussed, including sexual harassment and related laws, pregnancy-related work policy and regulations, challenges for women bosses and career moms, the glass ceiling, racism, women's relationships with male coworkers, and issues that rise when a woman is the breadwinner. This unique and timely set will appeal to those who are interested in psychology, women's studies, education, law, business, and public policy.

Black Women in Management identifies some of the differences and/or similarities that exist between these women's career choices and progression and explores how they address socio-cultural and gendered expectations of domestic, social and caring commitments as career women living and working in two urban cities – one African, the other European.

There is a highly significant and under-considered intersection and interaction between migration law and labor law. Labor lawyers have tended to regard migration law as generally speaking outside their purview, and migration lawyers have somewhat similarly tended to neglect labor law. The culmination of a collaborative project on 'Migrants at Work' funded by the John Fell Fund, the Society of Legal Scholars, and the Research Centre at St John's College, Oxford, this volume brings together distinguished legal and migration scholars to examine the impact of migration law on labor rights and how the regulation of migration increasingly impacts upon employment and labor relations. Examining and clarifying the interactions between migration, migration law, and labor law, contributors to the volume identify the many ways that migration law, as currently designed, divides the objectives of labor law, privileging concerns about the labor supply and demand over worker-protective concerns. In addition, migration law creates particular forms of status, which affect employment relations, thereby dividing the subjects of labor law. Chapters cover the labor laws of the UK, Australia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and the US. References are also made to discrete practices in Brazil, France, Greece, New Zealand, Mexico, Poland, and South Africa. These countries all host migrants and have developed systems of migration law reflecting very different trajectories. Some are traditional countries of immigration and settlement migration, while others have traditionally been countries of emigration but now import many workers. There are, nonetheless, common features in their immigration law which have a profound impact on labor law, for instance in their shared contemporary shift to using temporary labor migration programs. Further chapters examine EU and international law on migration, labor rights, human rights, and human trafficking and smuggling, developing cross-jurisdictional and multi-level perspectives. Written by leading scholars of labor law, migration law, and migration studies, this book provides a diverse and multidisciplinary approach to this field of legal interaction, of interest to academics, policymakers, legal practitioners, trade unions, and migrants' groups alike.

This revised and updated edition of Black Women in the Academy adds updated data on the status of Black faculty women, a forty-four-page bibliography, and a new chapter on the status of international faculty women from twenty different countries, to the only study of the decisions of African-American women to remain in, return to, or voluntarily leave the academy. Sheila Gregory creates a conceptual framework from economic, psychosocial, and job satisfaction theories to construct a model to explain the factors that affect the decision patterns influencing career mobility. She uses a survey of the members of the Association of Black Women in Higher Education to illustrate to what degree the designated variables predict decision patterns. Gregory's analysis focuses on the women who remained in the academy, noting that those who did remain were usually successful high-achievers who managed to overcome numerous obstacles involving career and family. The author also provides an outline detailing how to attract and retain talented Black women scholars, along with possible interventions that might help interinstitutional mobility.