Career & Job Resources

Women tend to be inherently cautious, to the point of overthinking their every move. This may help them stay safer than their male counterparts, but it also keeps them stuck in the action-first, fake-it-til-you-make-it ethos celebrated in the tech world shaking up the workforce today. What if women embraced the startup spirit? What if they had the confidence to take chances, even if they knew they may fail first? What if instead of agonizing over which step to take, they leapt forward quickly? These are the traits that helped Silicon Valley redefine our culture, and not surprisingly, these are the same lessons that can help all women succeed in all stages of their careers.In Fearless and Free, author Wendy Sachs has provided what O, The Oprah Magazine has called "pithy, invaluable guidance to women stymied in the workplace." With lessons learned from a wide range of women who faced down fears, roadblocks, and failures to reinvent themselves, Sachs's invaluable resource teaches women how to:* Boost their confidence* Sell their story* Capitalize on their skills and expand them* Nurture their network* Brand themselves--without bragging* Reposition themselves for reentering the workforce* And much more!By taking the disruptive methods that helped Silicon Valley send shockwaves across industries, Fearless and Free seeks to empower women in the workforce, showing them how to lean into their strengths, increase confidence, and make their impact known loud and clear.

Using first-hand narratives of women and their families, this book illustrates a new and changing sense of self among these daughters, whose mothers never had careers of their own. Focusing on the way these young career-oriented women engage with immediate society and the world at large, this book explores how they view traditional roles and how they are, in turn, viewed by the society.

A moving, cross-national account of working mothers' daily lives--and the revolution in public policy and culture needed to improve them. The work-family conflict that mothers experience today is a national crisis. Women struggle to balance breadwinning with the bulk of parenting, and stress is constant. Social policies don't help. Of all Western industrialized countries, the United States ranks dead last for supportive work-family policies: No federal paid parental leave. The highest gender wage gap. No minimum standard for vacation and sick days. The highest maternal and child poverty rates. Can American women look to European policies for solutions? Making Motherhood Work draws on interviews that sociologist Caitlyn Collins conducted over five years with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She explores how women navigate work and family given the different policy supports available in each country. Taking readers into women's homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, Collins shows that mothers' desires and expectations depend heavily on context. In Sweden--renowned for its gender-equal policies--mothers assume they will receive support from their partners, employers, and the government. In the former East Germany, with its history of mandated employment, mothers don't feel conflicted about working, but some curtail their work hours and ambitions. Mothers in western Germany and Italy, where maternalist values are strong, are stigmatized for pursuing careers. Meanwhile, American working mothers stand apart for their guilt and worry. Policies alone, Collins discovers, cannot solve women's struggles. Easing them will require a deeper understanding of cultural beliefs about gender equality, employment, and motherhood. With women held to unrealistic standards in all four countries, the best solutions demand that we redefine motherhood, work, and family. Making Motherhood Work vividly demonstrates that women need not accept their work-family conflict as inevitable.

Women now comprise the majority of the working class. Yet this fundamental transformation has gone largely unnoticed. This book is about how the sex of workers matters in understanding the jobs they do, the problems they face at work, and the new labor movements they are creating in the United States and globally. In The Sex of Class, twenty prominent scholars, labor leaders, and policy analysts look at the implication of this "sexual revolution" for labor policy and practice. In clear, crisp prose, The Sex of Class introduces readers to some of the most vibrant and forward-thinking social movements of our era: the clerical worker protests of the 1970s; the emergence of gay rights on the auto shop floor; the upsurge of union organizing in service jobs; worker centers and community unions of immigrant women; successful campaigns for paid family leave and work redesign; and innovative labor NGOs, cross-border alliances, and global labor federations. The Sex of Class reveals the animating ideas and the innovative strategies put into practice by the female leaders of the twenty-first-century social justice movement. The contributors to this book offer new ideas for how government can help reduce class and sex inequalities; they assess the status of women and sexual minorities within the traditional labor movement; and they provide inspiring case studies of how women workers and their allies are inventing new forms of worker representation and power.