Joan Williams

Joan C. Williams has played a central role in reshaping the debates over women, work and unconscious bias over the past quarter-century. She is widely known for her “bias interrupters,”—a new, evidence-based metrics-driven approach to eradicating implicit bias introduced in Harvard Business Review in 2014. For full open-sourced toolkits to eliminate bias in hiring, performance evaluations, and assignments, see www.biasinterrrupters.org.

Williams’ influential studies on implicit bias in STEM include a study of science professors—”Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias Against Women in STEM” (co-authored with Kathryn Phillips & Erika Hall) and a study of engineers—”Climate Control: Gender and Racial Bias in Engineering?” The first study, which had over 28,000 shares on social media, and was covered in Washington Post and elsewhere, examines how the experience of gender bias differs by race. The second study examines the parallels and differences between implicit bias based on gender and race.

Williams’ three NSF grants (with co-PI Mary Ann Mason) developed tools for advancing and retaining women in STEM on the web, including the sites www.genderbiasbingo.com, toolsforchangeinSTEM.org, and thepregnantscholar.org.

Williams is a Distinguished Law Professor and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She has authored 11 books and over 90 academic articles and book chapters, and ranks among the top 10 scholars in her field. She lectures widely. Her work has been covered in outlets as diverse as the Harvard Business Review, Oprah Magazine, Human Resource Executive, Jezebel, and the Yale Law Journal.