Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Feminist Fight Club
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1981
WEBSITE: http://www.jessicabennett.me/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.feministfightclub.com/ * http://www.jessicabennett.me/about/ * http://www.feministfightclub.com/the-author * https://leanin.org/stories/jessica-bennett/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Bennett_(journalist)
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1981, in Seattle, WA.
EDUCATION:Boston University, B.S.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, critic, writer, and editor. Newsweek, former staff writer; Time magazine, former columnist; Tumblr, executive editor; LeanIn.org, contributing editor.
AWARDS:GLAAD Media Award, 2009; New York Press Club award, 2011; Newswomen’s Club of New York award, 2011; James Beard Award.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and Cosmopolitan.
SIDELIGHTS
Jessica Bennett is a journalist and critic who has worked for major print and online media, including Time and Newsweek. She has “profiled Monica Lewinsky [and] Paula Broadwell,” states a biography on the Feminist Fight Club Web site, “and has tackled such important investigative topics as Resting Bitch Face.” Her book Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual (for a Sexist Workplace) examines the problem of sexism that still characterizes business office culture throughout the United States. “The forms of workplace sexism Bennett has in mind are the subtler, harder-to-contest varieties,” said Laura Kipnis in Slate, “in part because the guys enacting them are often nice enough fellows, not jerks. They’re your friends, progressives even.” “This guy you really like is doing it, a guy who calls himself a feminist but keeps interrupting you every time you speak. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it,” Bennett told Zosia Bielski for Toronto’s Globe and Mail. “Unless somebody calls you out, you’re unlikely to recognize it. That was the thinking behind playfully calling them out and giving them simple ways to change.” Kipnis continued: “The offenses range from familiar female complaints—being interrupted, being asked to get coffee and take notes at meetings, having your ideas ripped off without credit by male colleagues—to what seem like fairly minor irritants in the larger scheme of things: air conditioning geared to male body temperature, guys deploying sports lingo (like congratulating you on your ‘slam dunk’), and being called ‘kiddo.’”
The author sees her audience as millennials like herself to whom the battles of feminists in the 1960s and 1970s seem like ancient history. “You know, they’ve been raised on Girl Power, they had a female Secretary of State, and so forth,” Bennett said in an interview with Rebecca Fernandez appearing on the Web site Women Take Over. “But the reality is that gender inequality is still rampant, albeit in subtle ways. Many of those ways become visible when women graduate from school and enter into the workforce. So I think what we end up seeing is a lot of women embracing feminism later than our mother’s generations. I know that was the case for me. But really, better late than never.” According to Jonathan A. Knee in the New York Times, Bennett’s book draws on the same kind of research as Sheryl Sandberg’s study Lean In, but it is aimed at an “entirely different demographic in an entirely different voice. It is Lean In conceived as an illustrated guide for millennials. Where Ms. Sandberg is careful to avoid offense and clarify that she is not speaking for everyone, Ms. Bennett’s book includes a ‘womanifesto’ and a chapter subtitled ‘Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.’ Despite its irreverent tone, Feminist Fight Club is as grounded in academic research as Lean In.”
Bennett saw rampant sexism in play herself while she worked in print media. “The ‘aha’ moment for me was when I was a writer at Newsweek,” Bennett said in an interview excerpted in a Washington Post article by Julia Carpenter. “I couldn’t get stories into the magazine and I was frustrated. I was frustrated and I would see stories that I had pitched previously be repitched by men who were my age and they’d come up with it and get approved and mine would get turned down.” “To combat these inequalities, Bennett and her female friends did what millions of women do: They got together after work, ate, drank and bitched,” explained Zosia Bielski in the Globe and Mail. “They described helming duties many rungs above their official job titles and pay grades, or having their ideas co-opted by bros, or ‘bropropriators,’ as Bennett calls them. But their ‘feminist fight club’ wasn’t all griping: The women would also vet each other’s résumés, promote each other professionally and pick up the lunch tab for those who were temporarily unemployed.”
The point that led Bennett to begin writing her book came when she found out that her own workplace had been the object of a discrimination suit decades before. “We stumbled upon the fact,” Bennett told Carpenter, “that 40 years earlier, the women of Newsweek magazine had sued the magazine for workplace discrimination. And so much of the descriptions felt like it could have been written yesterday.” “My click moment,” Bennett said in her Washington Post interview, “was realizing that … there was a whole cohort of women 40 years earlier who had been experiencing the same thing.” “This manifesto,” asserted Rebecca Vnuk in Booklist, “just might be the weapon modern women are looking for.” “Bennett’s light approach and humorous neologisms,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “make fighting the power a lot more palatable.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Bennett, Jessica, Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual (for a Sexist Workplace), with Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, illustrated by Saskia Wariner, Harper Wave (New York, NY), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2016, Rebecca Vnuk, review of Feminist Fight Club, p. 16.
Globe and Mail (Toronto, ON, Canada), September 8, 2016, Zosia Bielski, “Author Jessica Bennett on Her Coping-Manual-Slash-Manifesto, Feminist Fight Club.”
New York Times, September 15, 2016, Jonathan A. Knee, “‘Feminist Fight Club’ Takes On Workplace Sexism.”
Publishers Weekly, July 18, 2016, review of Feminist Fight Club, p. 201.
Washington Post, September 22, 2016, Julia Carpenter, “Jessica Bennett Wants to Show You How to Start Your Own Feminist Fight Club.”
ONLINE
Feminist Fight Club Web site, http://www.feministfightclub.com/ (May 3, 2017), author profile.
Jessica Bennett Home Page, http://www.jessicabennett.me (May 3, 2017).
LeanIn.org, http://leanin.org/ (May 3, 2017), author profile.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (September 7, 2016), Laura Kipnis, review of Feminist Fight Club.
Women Take Over, http://thewomentakeover.com/ (April 1, 2014), Rebecca Fernandez, “Jessica Bennett: Writer, Editor, Advocate.”
Jessica Bennett is an award-winning journalist and critic who writes on gender, sexuality and culture as a contributing writer for the New York Times. She has covered sexual assault on campus, spent time with Hillary Clinton’s childhood best friends, and was the first journalist to profile Monica Lewinsky in a decade. She also writes a monthly column on digital language called Command Z.
A former staff writer at Newsweek and columnist at Time.com, Jessica is also editor-at-large for Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org, where she is the cofounder and curator of the Lean In Collection, an initiative with Getty Images to change the depiction of women in stock photography. She is the author of Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace, and has spoken about gender bias and diversity at leading institutions and government agencies, including Harvard Business School, Facebook, Google, Thomson Reuters and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Yes, she's in a real-life feminist fight club.
Jessica Bennett (journalist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Jessica Bennett
Born Seattle, Washington
Residence New York City
Education Boston University
Occupation Journalist
Employer Newsweek
TIME
Tumblr
Awards New York Press Club Award (multiple)
Newswomen's Club of New York (multiple)
GLAAD Media Award
James Beard
ASME (nominated)
Website Jessica Bennett
Jessica Bennett (born 1981) is a journalist who writes on gender, sexuality and culture. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times and a former columnist at Time. She is the author of Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace.
Contents
1 Personal background
2 Career
3 Awards and honors
4 References
5 External links
Personal background
Bennett grew up in Seattle, Washington, where she attended Garfield High School. She received a B.S. from Boston University, where she was a student reporter covering crime at The Boston Globe. She moved to New York City after college to become a research assistant to investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.[citation needed]
Career
Bennett began her career at Newsweek, where she spent seven years as a staff writer and editor. She wrote a controversial cover story about the magazine's long history of sexism, framed around the story of 46 female staffers who sued the company for gender discrimination in the 1970s, paving the way for female journalists.[1] That story is the subject of a book, The Good Girls Revolt, by Lynn Povich[2] and a new Amazon television series by the same name.[3] Bennett left Newsweek to become the executive editor of Tumblr[4] and later a contributing editor to Sheryl Sandberg's women's nonprofit, LeanIn.org,[5] where she co-founded and curates the Lean In Collection with Getty Images, a photo initiative to change the depiction of women in stock photography.[6]
Bennett has written on millennials and marriage, feminism, stay-at-home dads,[7] gay rights, pot policy, school bullying and writes a monthly column for the New York Times style section called Command Z, which takes on communication in the modern age.[8] She has profiled Monica Lewinsky,[9] Paula Broadwell[10] and wrote a piece on resting bitch face.[11]
She also covered the Jerry Sandusky abuse scandal,[12][13] the bully suicide of Phoebe Prince,[14][15][16][17] and won a NY Press Club award for the story on the Nikki Catsouras photographs controversy, a young woman killed in a car accident whose death photos went viral after being leaked by the Highway Patrol.[18][19]
Bennett's first book, Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace, was published by HarperCollins in September 2016.[20]
Awards and honors
Bennett has received the Newswomen's Club of New York's 2011 Front Page Award in the category of "Online—Multimedia" for her work on "The Beauty Advantage" in Newsweek;[21] a 2009 GLAAD Media Award in the category of "Outstanding Digital Journalism—Multimedia for "Is Gay the New Black?" in Newsweek;[22] and a 2011 New York Press Club Journalism Award in the category of "Outstanding Web Coverage" for "Welcome to Potopia" in Newsweek.[23]
Jessica Bennett
Jessica Bennett is an award-winning journalist and critic who writes on gender issues, sexuality and culture. She is a feature writer and columnist at the New York Times, where you can regularly find her byline in the Sunday style section on topics ranging from feminists joining Greek life to female pot entrepreneurs to the hyperbole of internet speak, which has left her literally dead, like so dead she is six feet under rolling in her grave. She has profiled Monica Lewinsky, Paula Broadwell, and has tackled such important investigative topics such as Resting Bitch Face.
Jessica’s work has also appeared in Newsweek, where she began her career as a staff writer, Time, where she was a columnist, and Cosmopolitan, where she helps edit a quarterly section on women and work. She is a contributing editor at LeanIn.Org, the nonprofit founded by Sheryl Sandberg, where she is the cofounder and curator of the Lean In Collection -- a partnership with Getty Images to change the way women are depicted in stock photography. She lives in New York City.
Author Jessica Bennett on her coping-manual-slash-manifesto, Feminist Fight Club
Zosia Bielski
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Sep. 08, 2016 1:54PM EDT
Last updated Wednesday, Sep. 14, 2016 4:02PM EDT
8 Comments
PrintLicense article
Fight for your right to work
Inequality in the workplace may be more subtle than in the Mad Men era, but women say it’s just as pernicious as ever
Jessica Bennett is a New York Times journalist and author of Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual (For a Sexist Workplace).
How often does your boss ask you to “take notes” at a meeting? Do you find yourself getting interrupted by colleagues who blather and take up your airtime during a pitch? When’s the last time you found yourself fetching a cake for the office holiday party?
Depending on your gender, the answers will differ wildly, says Jessica Bennett, a New York Times journalist whose new book Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual (For a Sexist Workplace) shines an unsparing light on the casual and often oblivious workplace sexism of 2016.
While today’s offices are hardly a Mad Men stage set – the offending party probably considers himself a feminist, or she might be a fellow woman – Bennett combed the research and unearthed a disheartening number of “statistically common” sexist scenarios still percolating in even the most progressive offices.
They are irritating moments most professional women will recognize from their day-to-day, such as that men interrupt their female colleagues at twice the rate of other women. Or that women are labelled as dominating for speaking a mere 25 per cent to 50 per cent of the time in meetings. Or that men are deemed “busy” when they refuse extra work, while women take a hit on their likeability and their performance reviews when they push back in a similar way.
“Long-ingrained attitudes don’t just evaporate in a generation,” writes Bennett of today’s quieter, slyer brand of gender discrimination at the office.
Most problematically, women face a lingering gender wage gap: Women working full-time in Canada still make just 73.5 cents for every dollar men make. Women are one-quarter as likely as men to ask for a raise, asking for less when they do. During salary negotiations, women are more likely to be bluffed by bosses who resist giving them raises, using excuses such as “budget cuts.”
To combat these inequalities, Bennett and her female friends did what millions of women do: They got together after work, ate, drank and bitched. They described helming duties many rungs above their official job titles and pay grades, or having their ideas co-opted by bros, or “bropropiators,” as Bennett calls them. But their “feminist fight club” wasn’t all griping: The women would also vet each other’s résumés, promote each other professionally and pick up the lunch tab for those who were temporarily unemployed.
With her book, Bennett hopes to expand this corporate consciousness-raising exercise beyond her friend circle. Her advice is shrewd, direct and often searingly caustic: A chapter titled What Would Josh Do? How to Carry Yourself with the Confidence of a Mediocre Man recommends women start acting more like men to get ahead. The 34-year-old author spoke with The Globe and Mail from New York.
Times I Apologized. Illustrated by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell.
The sexism of yore was blatant, your boss pinching your ass. Given that most workplace sexism today is not overt or even intentional or conscious at times, why did you want to take it on with a book?
With the subtle sexism today, it’s easy to turn inward and question whether you’re crazy or imagining it. What we see today – a guy interrupting you in a meeting, or the internal self-doubt women face – is a systemic problem, not an individual one. It’s a product of years of not being in power. It doesn’t have a legal definition and there aren’t systems in place to prevent it: No matter how many diversity training or sexual-harassment workshops you require employees to take, they don’t necessarily deal with these issues. It’s on the individual to deal with it and it’s hard to call this stuff out.
This book aims to help women address men who are minimizing them at work. These are often modern men who think they’re living in a postsexist world. How do you reach these guys without spooking them?
That’s what’s so tricky here: This guy you really like is doing it, a guy who calls himself a feminist but keeps interrupting you every time you speak. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. In a lot of cases this behaviour is not malicious. With my generation, millennials, the research shows that men want to do the right thing. Still, when you’ve had privilege for a long time there are behaviours embedded in you. Unless somebody calls you out, you’re unlikely to recognize it. That was the thinking behind playfully calling them out and giving them simple ways to change.
Famous Bropropriations. Illustrated by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell.
So many successful women still suffer from “imposter syndrome,” a feeling that they don’t deserve to be where they are. You believe imposter syndrome is today’s version of feminist Betty Friedan’s “the problem that has no name” – the malaise of housewives in the fifties and sixties.
The psychological theory of imposter syndrome has put a name on this feeling that so many women – I would venture to say every woman – feel at one point or another: that you don’t belong, that you’re a fraud. It’s common in people who have the pressure of being the first ones to do something. Women don’t feel imposter syndrome at home but they feel it in the workplace because they haven’t traditionally been there. Maybe some day we’ll get to a place where women will feel imposter syndrome at home, because they aren’t used to being there.
You also write about women sabotaging themselves. Why do women play down their professional achievements as “luck,” tremble at the thought of asking for a raise, or haul their baked goods into the office?
These things run deep. We’ve been told for so long that you should be grateful for what you have and be loyal, put your head down and eventually the recognition will come to you. Well, that doesn’t always work.
Wanted - Unsmiling Woman. Illustrated by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell.
More on that baking: Is it really bad to bring your world-renowned chocolate peanut-butter squares into the office?
If you’re spending your time baking cakes or organizing the office holiday party, it takes valuable time away from working on high-visibility projects that get you noticed and earn you respect. While people may like those who bring cupcakes to the office, they’re not necessarily going to respect them. Women have to be very careful deciding to do those kinds of tasks. It falls into the stereotype of woman as a caretaker.
Beyond self-sabotage, some women also chronically undercut other women. What’s going on there?
We are taught that there are only a few spots for women in business roles or at the top. Women are only 4 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs. Of course you’re going to feel like you have to elbow the woman next to you. I’ve felt competitive with other women many times during my career and I’ve had to check myself: Can’t we help each other? I’m trying to remember this the next time I think a female boss is being bitchy or has it out for me, or that a younger female employee is going to take my job. Instead I try to connect with that person, whether it’s going out for a drink or having coffee, to try to become allies.
High Power-Low Power. Illustrated by Saskia Keultjes.
What about women who you’ve termed the “generational grenade throwers”? Women who entered the workplace decades ago and, oddly, give younger women a hard time for not pulling their weight through equally sexist trenches?
That’s not just a gender thing: Every generation looks upon the generation after it and thinks that these people have it easy. But in some ways we do have it a lot easier. If you rose to power as a business woman in the sixties, seventies or eighties, you had to work a lot harder to get there. But feeling that women who come after you should fight just as hard defeats the purpose. If some day my daughter doesn’t have to deal with any of these barriers, I will be happy. I will know that I contributed to it, just as I’ve learned from the women who came before me. Sometimes it’s as simple as acknowledging that they started this battle. It’s the generations after us that will finish it.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jessica Bennett: Writer, Editor, Advocate
By Rebecca Fernandez @parksfernandez · On April 1, 2014
Some people are so gifted with words that you want to drop everything and read anything they’ve ever written. For me, no one fits that description more perfectly than Jessica Bennett. Besides being an outspoken advocate for equal rights, she’s been the executive editor at Tumblr, a senior editor at Newsweek, and has had pieces published everywhere from The Atlantic to The New York Times.
All her brilliance aside, she also happens to be really nice and incredibly funny.
Do you consider yourself a feminist?
Fuck yes! And proud.
How do you define “feminism”?
Feminism is the belief in equality for men and women. That’s not just how I define it, that is the definition. I can’t stand when people say they believe in the above (ahem, Marisa Mayer) but that they’re not a feminist. YES YOU ARE. Own it, girl!
Why do you think women are tentative to call themselves feminists?
The word feminism has a lot of baggage… angry, humorless, combat-boot wearing, bra-burning… no matter that none of this is true. (Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time somebody referenced “bra-burning” to me. It didn’t happen! Look it up!). But I think there’s something else at play here, too: the idea that young women who are outpacing their male peers in academics don’t need feminism. You know, they’ve been raised on Girl Power, they had a female Secretary of State, and so forth. But the reality is that gender inequality is still rampant, albeit in subtle ways. Many of those ways become visible when women graduate from school and enter into the workforce. So I think what we end up seeing is a lot of women embracing feminism later than our mother’s generations. I know that was the case for me. But really, better late than never.
Do you think the judgement of women by other women is a problem? What do you think we can do to be more supportive of one another?
I’ve become part of a number of women’s networking groups in NYC over the past few years, and any hesitance I had about supporting or taking the support of other women has completely disappeared — I can’t overemphasize how amazing it is to have a group of badass ladies as part of your network who you know will have your back. So, I think we all have to take it upon ourselves to break out of that mold, to buck the expectation that we must compete against one another, to find women to mentor, or women we want to be our mentors. I also think that institutional change can help solve that problem. As long as the halls of power are dominated by men, any woman in a position of power is going to believe she has to cling tightly to that role. Rather than helping women rise up, she’s going to fear that another talented woman will replace her. And as long as business shows us that there is only room for one or two women at the top, that feeling is going to persist. The best way to change that? Get more women at the top.
How do you think we can make a difference in the world?
Oh God, I’m not sure I’m any real role model in this realm, but I guess I’d say stand up, and speak up, for what you believe in. It takes outspoken voices to change the status quo.
I loved what you wrote about Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In.” What did you learn from reading the thoughts of Sandberg and the statistics she shared?
I think the main thing Sandberg has done is put a public voice to what many women have often felt in their professional lives. She validated it, from a position of huge power. She has taken a word that women didn’t want to associate with — feminism — and made it a conversation that’s at the top of the New York Times book review (for 6 weeks and counting!). I seriously believe Sheryl Sandberg is going to make feminism cool again. And for women who still aren’t comfortable with the word? Well, she’s given them an alternative: Lean In.
What books have made an impact on your life?
“Curse of the Good Girl” by Rachel Simmons, who I’m hopefully collaborating on a project with, and the early work of Nora Ephron, who I was lucky enough to meet. But perhaps most importantly is “In Our Time” by Susan Brownmiller, which taught me about the women of Newsweek who sued the company for gender discrimination in 1970- in the first lawsuit of its kind. I spent seven years as a writer for Newsweek, and that tidbit in that book was the inspiration for a cover story that two colleagues and I would write about women and work, sexism at Newsweek, and how much had changed since then. That story changed a lot about my career, and how I saw the world.
Jessica Bennett wants to show you how to start your own feminist fight club
By Julia Carpenter September 22, 2016
Journalist Jessica Bennett’s advice to young career women: speak up. (Matthew Eisman/Getty Images)
When Jess Bennett was a struggling woman frustrated by the microaggressions, insults and sexist slights plaguing her own office, she and her lady colleagues formed their own answer to the “old boys network”: a consciousness-raising-esque group they semi-jokingly called “Feminist Fight Club,” complete with a list of rules.
In her new book, “Feminist Fight Club,” Bennett reprints that same list of rules. The book, subtitled as “an office survival manual for a sexist workplace” lays out strategies for defeating “manterrupters,” “bropropriators,” “himitators” and “menstruhaters.” The book takes women through the various challenges of a still-sexist 2016 workplace, with tips for forming feminist alliances, negotiating for raises and more — complete with illustrations, cartoons, lists, how-to guides and more.
Bennett says she didn’t just want a memoir relaying her own workplace conflicts; instead, she envisioned “Feminist Fight Club” as a guide for women navigating the same hurdles in their own offices. In other words, the book she needed herself when she was just starting out.
In an interview with The Washington Post earlier this week, Bennett talked about the origins of the book, her own work struggles and her advice for baby feminists. The following responses have been edited for length and clarity.
[Pay Up is a community for women who want to support each other and get closer to closing the gender gap. Join here.]
On making a “manual.” Not just a book, a “manual.”
So I wanted to figure out how to make it digestible. I’m certainly not the first person to tackle this topic. There are a ton of books out there about this, and most are pretty dense. There are books about gender or books about the workplace — none of them really combine the two. I wanted to combine gender and the workplace manual into one, and make it fun. I basically went to Urban Outfitters and bought every guidebook that exists: the workplace dummies’ guide, “The Zombie Survival Guide.” And obviously I read gender books already for work. And then I got “The Art of War.” And I thought: What if we turned this serious masculine war manual on its head? And we make it playful and feminist? I wanted something that you could flip through, that you could stuff in your purse, that you could hide underneath your cubicle if you had to, that you could read in the bathroom right before you went out for your raise. That you could read like a weapon.
[Ladies, there’s a good chance that every guy you knew in college earns more money than you]
On detecting workplace inequality — and fighting back
The “aha” moment for me was when I was a writer at Newsweek. I couldn’t get stories into the magazine and I was frustrated. I was frustrated and I would see stories that I had pitched previously be repitched by men who were my age and they’d come up with it and get approved and mine would get turned down. And I started talking to friends about it, female friends, and we all realized we were experiencing the same frustrations, and throughout that practice, we stumbled upon the fact that 40 years earlier, the women of Newsweek magazine had sued the magazine for workplace discrimination. And so much of the descriptions felt like it could have been written yesterday. We asked, “Did you know there was a lawsuit?” It was the first of its kind. It was a huge, huge deal and we’d never heard of it. And we couldn’t believe people in our own office even knew this story. They were like, “Oh yeah, maybe it went to the Supreme Court? I don’t know what happens.” So we decided we were going to report a story about those women on the 40th anniversary and we looked at what had changed. And we reported it in secret and we tracked down those women. My click moment was realizing that I was a staff writer at Newsweek, and there was a whole cohort of women 40 years earlier who had been experiencing the same thing.
[Sexism is over, according to most men]
On finding your own “aha” moment
Knowing this is still a problem is huge. It took me years of working to realize that. Because women are thriving in their academic careers, it can be a shock to get to the workplace and realize that things are still not equal. I was totally progressive, granola. To suddenly be in New York working at a magazine and to think, “Sexism is still a thing? Do I need to be a feminist? Oh my God, I’m a feminist?” The baby feminists must know this is an issue — recognizing this is still not equal, No. 1. No. 2, I think, is treating other women as allies. I’m 34 now and I feel like the college women I talk to are much more on board with this idea of girl power and girl gangs and camaraderie than I ever was and the older generations ever were. So maybe they’re ahead of where I was. They have a much more complex understanding of intersectionality than I did.
On finding your own fight club
It’s really easy to be competitive with other women. I certainly have and sometimes still do. I have to remind myself very clearly and frequently of the rule of the fight club: “Other women are my allies, not my enemies.” That was a real rule. The rules were sort of funny and jokey, but they were also serious. And it truly has changed my perspective on so much. There’s so many times in my professional life where my instinct is to be competitive with another woman in the room, and I have to stop my instinct and say, “Why is that? Oh yeah, that’s the patriarchy. We need to support one another.” And it totally shifted something in my brain. And oftentimes we become comrades and allies.
On fighting back with data
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My experience has mostly been in office culture, so that’s what this focuses on. And the reality that male privilege and the things that cause men to interrupt you or get credit for your ideas is everywhere in the working world — whether you’re a nurse or a teacher or you work an hourly wage job or you work on a construction site. So I hope in that sense this book has something in it for everyone. I also had to work really hard to dig up the research about women of color. I had a Harvard researcher to help me because I couldn’t find a lot of it, so I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Much in the same way that people didn’t study women for so long because they weren’t in the workplace, now there’s not as much research looking at women of color because they haven’t made up as large a part. And that’s changing, and I think the research will ultimately reflect that, but I had to work hard to be inclusive. I’m not making these things up — they’re all rooted in real research that exists.
Her recommended reading for baby feminists
Rachel Simmons, “The Curse of the Good Girl” (2009). I read that back when I was at Newsweek before reporting that story about the women of Newsweek. It deals a lot with the inner voice that tells us we’re not good enough and tell us we need to be “nice girls.”
“Sisterhood is Powerful” by Robin Morgan (1970). I had this open on my desk throughout the entire writing of this book. She has a section at the front called “verbal karate” and it’s just a list of stats that women can use as fight moves, like when people say “men don’t interrupt” or “sexism doesn’t exist.” And I tried to do a version of that. And she says at the beginning of the book, this book is an action.
Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace
263.29 (July 18, 2016): p201.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace
Jessica Bennett. Harper Wave, $24.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0-06-243978-9
In 2009, journalist Bennett, who now writes about gender and culture for the New York Times, founded the Feminist Fight Club with a group of 11 career-minded women living in N.Y.C. to discuss their professional setbacks and successes battling sexism on the job, and many of these experiences are recounted here. Bringing levity to common frustrations, Bennett lists ways (or "fight moves") to combat the bad behavior of workplace-perpetrator archetypes such as the "manterrupter" ("he who won't shut up") and the "bropropriator" (he who "appropriates credit for another's work"). She gives advice on avoiding coffee fetching and "office housework" and hacks away at sexist stereotypes with discussions on such issues as the fine line between assertive and aggressive. A language lesson explores minimizing speech patterns such as up-speak, hedging, and vocal fry. Tips on self-confidence boosting are punctuated with quotations from Tina Fey, Michelle Obama, and other successful women giving career advice to women. It is saddening that the problems described by the book persist, but Bennett's light approach and humorous neologisms make fighting the power a lot more palatable. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 201+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459287570&it=r&asid=09503bb7e7074258ac752f5f81124d9e. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459287570
Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace
Rebecca Vnuk
112.21 (July 1, 2016): p16.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace. By Jessica Bennett. Sept. 2016. 256p. illus. HarperWave, $24.99 (9780062439789). 650.
Journalist Bennett was part of a circle of female friends who started meeting to complain about their jobs. The women quickly realized that the bulk of their problems stemmed from sexist behavior, and the gatherings became less bitch sessions, more call-to-action meetings. Bennett shares what she's learned, hoping to give women the confidence to speak up and fight the patriarchy. There's plenty of humor here, to be sure, but there is a lot of practical and useful information, too. Just because there is a snarky chart describing the five types of Manterrupter (including the Dismisser and the Ass Kisser) doesn't mean that the point of the chart is any less true: these are the types of men women encounter regularly at work. The book is designed with short, choppy chapters that readers can dip in and out of, and is peppered with comical illustrations, adding to the fun factor. But don't let that casual tone fool you. Bennett is on a mission to reform today's workplaces, and this manifesto just might be the weapon modern women are looking for.--Rebecca Vnuk
Vnuk, Rebecca
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vnuk, Rebecca. "Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace." Booklist, 1 July 2016, p. 16. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459888898&it=r&asid=7030da5a285b7072872c5a3aab3692c7. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459888898
Review: 'Feminist Fight Club' Takes On Workplace Sexism
Jonathan A. Knee
(Sept. 15, 2016): Business News: pNA(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
The last 20 years has seen a reduction in many of the most blatant forms of workplace discrimination against women. A recent Harvard Business Review article reported, however, that subtle bias is often worse than the more overt variety. The very ambiguity of the behavior heightens stress and diminishes the chances of successfully seeking recourse, legal or otherwise. This could explain, in part, the stubborn persistence of the wage gap and continued underrepresentation of women in top corporate and professional roles -- despite decades of women outnumbering and outperforming men through college.
The good news is that there has been an explosion in detailed social science research documenting these subtler obstacles to women achieving their full professional potential. Overwhelmingly, the greatest challenges to women stem from unjustified perceptions -- for instance, that a working mother has a lack of commitment -- reinforced by erroneous perceptions, which is reflected in the tendency to attribute credit for women's work to men. Some research also points to the behaviors of women -- for instance, an unwillingness to ask for a raise, say ''no'' to unreasonable requests or take credit for their own achievements. Yet these tendencies are often a rational response to the negative reactions elicited when women undertake activities or display traits that are viewed neutrally or even positively in men. One recent study suggests that women increasingly do ask for raises with similar frequency to men, but are 25 percent less likely to get one.
There are significant hurdles, however, to using academic research to stimulate actual changes in the workplace. First, the research must be made accessible (both the language itself and where it is published) to a general audience. Second, nuanced strategies must be created to focus on behaviors that often reflect unconscious predispositions.
A number of books in recent years have taken up the joint challenge of increasing awareness and developing practical tools and policies to combat these institutional and psychological biases. The most influential of these has been Sheryl Sandberg's 2013 best seller ''Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.'' Ms. Sandberg's book attracted a dizzying array of criticism, much of which seemed to have been based on its title rather than its substance. Ms. Sandberg's narrative was explicitly rooted in her own life experiences. At the time, she made clear that her focus was ''most relevant to women fortunate enough to have choices'' rather than those ''struggling to make ends meet,'' and more recently she even apologized for not having been more sensitive to the challenges of single motherhood.
Now comes Jessica Bennett's ''Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual (For a Sexist Workplace),'' which uses the same academic research base to speak to an entirely different demographic in an entirely different voice. It is ''Lean In'' conceived as an illustrated guide for millennials. Where Ms. Sandberg is careful to avoid offense and clarify that she is not speaking for everyone, Ms. Bennett's book includes a ''womanifesto'' and a chapter subtitled ''Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.'' Despite its irreverent tone, ''Feminist Fight Club'' is as grounded in academic research as ''Lean In.''
Toward the end, it includes a helpful six-page letter to men. Until then, however, the book is chock-full of stories, drawings and mostly practical advice for working women. The topics covered range from lactation and power poses to negotiating raises and mentoring. Ms. Bennett manages to convey a remarkable amount of substance briskly and entertainingly.
If I have a criticism of the book, it is the lack of a narrative arc. Ms. Bennett uses the establishment of her own Feminist Fight Club (essentially a support group of early-career women) as a loose theme to tie the various pieces, but in the opening pages she suggests that the book can be read in almost any order. As a 54-year-old white man (who may or may not be mediocre), I admit that I am not well placed to judge whether Ms. Bennett has hit on the most effective way to transmit important information to Gen Y. I can't help but cling, however, to the old-fashioned notion that it is easier to retain information integrated into an overarching story line rather than as disconnected bits and pieces. That said, if ''Feminist Fight Club'' is on the right track in its presentation style, it has performed a huge service not just to its target audience but to the businesses they will be joining.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Knee, Jonathan A. "Review: 'Feminist Fight Club' Takes On Workplace Sexism." New York Times, 15 Sept. 2016, p. NA(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463489141&it=r&asid=dc029c101797d32c83910ef5eeeaf9f9. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463489141
Girl, Manterrupted
629
87
707
What’s the role of cutesy workplace feminism, full of slang like himitator and bropriator, amid the deeply un-cute sexism of Ailes and his ilk?
By Laura Kipnis
Girl Manterrupted.
Luke Howard
You have to feel bad for a writer who, waiting out the eternity between finishing a book and its pub date, awakens one morning to find that not only is her subject all over the headlines but that the breaking news is landscape-altering. Or so I was thinking when, shortly after my copy of Jessica Bennett’s Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace arrived, former Fox newscaster Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment suit against Fox chairman and uber-creep Roger Ailes, ultimately bringing down one of the most powerful and seemingly inviolable men in corporate America. Not so inviolable after all, it turned out. Sure his severance package was more than most people’s lifetime earnings, but even so, the status quo of sexist office culture had been irrevocably shattered.
When Rupert Murdoch et fils are the public face of workplace gender reform, the world really is in transition. I suppose it’s too early to gauge the extent of the trickle-down effect on American offices, but I’d like to think that handsy, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer bosses and co-workers—a big chunk of the Fox demographic, I assume—have been undergoing collective, painful lightning bolts of self-recognition. “Roger, c’est moi,” I picture them gasping to themselves, fending off waves of self-disgust and thanking God they’d had the chance to reform their nasty ways before they too made headlines.
When Rupert Murdoch et fils are the public face of workplace gender reform, the world really is in transition.
Anyway, such were my fantasies when I began Feminist Fight Club, wondering what advice Bennett would have given Carlson and the rest of Ailes’ female prey in the Fox newsroom. I found to my surprise that Bennett doesn’t actually address the subject of sexual harassment, which I’d always assumed was one of the main things making sexist workplaces sexist. But no, aside from a brief mention of guys she calls “lurkers”—the sort who spend too much time hanging around your desk for no reason—sexual harassment isn’t on Bennett’s radar.
Nor does pay equity occupy much of the book—it gets one paragraph, in which we learn that if you adjust for comparable colleges and job choices, first-year female college graduates make “just 93 percent of what their male peers do.” I wondered why that “just” was necessary, since a 7 percent pay differential sounds like progress to me. (Overall women make 79 percent of male income, Bennett says, but it’s a hard number to pin down precisely, given men’s and women’s different life trajectories, meaning the children thing.)
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So if sexual harassment and pay equity aren’t the problem, what is? It turns out that the forms of workplace sexism Bennett has in mind are the subtler, harder-to-contest varieties, in part because the guys enacting them are often nice enough fellows, not jerks. They’re your friends, progressives even. The offenses range from familiar female complaints—being interrupted, being asked to get coffee and take notes at meetings, having your ideas ripped off without credit by male colleagues—to what seem like fairly minor irritants in the larger scheme of things: air conditioning geared to male body temperature, guys deploying sports lingo (like congratulating you on your “slam dunk”), and being called “kiddo.”
Bennett’s move is to update the familiar complaints with a lot of cute names—male types to watch out for include the Manterrupter, the Dismisser, the Bropriator, the Himitator, the Menstruhater (who thinks it’s always “that time of the month” when a woman gets irritable), and the Stenographucker, who treats you like the office secretary. Based on strategy sessions with her own “feminist fight club”—a group of similarly situated friends who get together to carp about work—she offers advice in the form of “Fight Moves”: “Put the Phucker in His Place,” “Underpromise, Overdeliver,” “Throw to a Bro,” “Womanspread.” When asked to make coffee, turn yourself into a “Bad Barista”—just claim not to know how. The tactics come with more cute names, a fair amount of it female-anatomy based: “#PussyPosse” “Vagffirmative Action” “Reach Clitoral Mass.” There are also drawings; they too are cute.
All this whimsy is heavy going, and weirdly at odds with the larger message of the book, which is that your femininity isn’t going to get you very far at work—in fact it may be your big problem. If certain male behaviors are entrenched, so are certain female behaviors, and Feminist Fight Club is most trenchant when it moves from “Know the Enemy” to “Know Yourself.” In other words, maybe it’s not simply that men are sabotaging women; it’s that we’re sabotaging ourselves. We’re constantly asking “Are we good enough?” and answering no. We panic or babble when talking in meetings (“The Clusterfuck of Speaking While Female,” as Bennett subtitles one chapter). We’re afflicted by typically feminine traits like apologizing, hedging, and excessive use of emojis. Also upspeak. We’re bad at negotiating raises or anything else.
One way to read this book would be as an anti-femininity manual, and in fact the book’s best advice is to succeed by “carrying yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” Bennett’s example is “Josh,” a former colleague who always seemed to get what he wanted, despite not working very hard or taking anything that seriously. Josh wasn’t an asshole, in fact he was kind of a mensch, but he knew how to put himself first. He knew to grab the seat next to the boss at meetings and schmooze him; he knew how to play the room and jump on the smart ideas; he didn’t give a shit what people thought of him. “What would Josh do?” became Bennett’s mantra, especially when she realized that not only were Josh’s instincts the polar opposite of hers, his were working a lot better.
But Josh is a big picture guy, and a lot of this book is taken up with small bore issues. Bennett understands that with 42 million women in America living on the brink of poverty (the number is hers), some of her concerns sound trivial, but there she is complaining about the AC nonetheless. Believe me, I can outcomplain anyone when it comes to room temperature, though I deeply loathe about myself the ineradicable princess-and-the-pea feminine propensities that leave me far more fixated on the micro-discomforts of heating, lighting, and irritating noise than any man I know. My personal “fight move” is attempting to keep such things in scale, or when that’s not possible, suffering silently.
Bennett’s lack of attention to scale becomes the default politics of her book. One of her big demands (or “asks,” in corporate-speak) turns out to be dedicated lactation rooms in offices, the absence of which leaves nursing women to figure out how and where to pump breast milk at work. No, a supply closet won’t do. The lactation issue comes up repeatedly (avoiding repetition is not this book’s strong suit) and gets many pages, though in fact it’s a battle won, at least formally, as per the 2010 Affordable Care Act, according to which bathrooms can’t serve as lactation rooms either.
Yet somehow she devotes zero pages to the far larger question: what you’re doing with the kid while you’re pumping at the office. The universal child care “ask” gets not a mention, despite the fact that the months of her working life the average woman spends pumping milk make up a minuscule slice compared with the years she’s going to spend raising and tending children.
Universal child care would change vast numbers of working women’s lives significantly—women of all classes. It would also mean a deep structural overhaul of the rules undergirding the American economy. Nothing would show more real commitment to working women than reallocating resources to child care, to be funded by—as has been proposed—closing corporate tax loopholes. Whereas the “woman-friendly” workplace measures Bennett supports—flexible hours, parental leave policies (I noted she didn’t say paid leave)—are ones that won’t in any way disrupt the existing distribution of resources. In fact, Bennett tries to sell such measures by citing research indicating that they increase productivity. Here’s the question she doesn’t take up: Where would the benefits of that increased productivity go?
Male types to watch out for include the Dismisser, the Bropriator, and the Stenographucker, who treats you like the office secretary.
Bennett and I clearly get irked about different issues, but here’s something else I find super irritating about the American workplace: those outrageous CEO salaries. Even more than I want the AC turned down, I want caps on off-the-charts CEO compensation. I wondered if maybe resource issues escaped Bennett’s attention because she’s a protégée of billionaire Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg, whom she deifies to an embarrassing degree—“Seriously, this woman is good at everything”—and whose best-selling book, Lean In, Bennett touts to the point of product placement. She even suggests leaving copies of it “casually placed on the desks of male bosses” as one of her “fight moves.” We learn at the end of the book that Bennett parlayed a casual acquaintance with Sandberg (Bennett had once interviewed her) into a job with LeanIn.org. (The marketing campaign for Feminist Fight Club also lists “Cross-promotion with LeanIn.org.”) Schmoozing the boss and touting her ideas—I guess this is what Josh would do.
I was never able to bring myself to read Lean In; my feminist heroes wanted to bring down corporate America, not run it. Also I’d read the various critiques faulting Sandberg for her “neo-liberal faux feminism,” meaning—so say her critics—that she touts an ethic of individual responsibility while ignoring structural and racial inequalities. But I have watched Sandberg’s 2010 TED Talk, which allegedly sparked Lean In. Like Bennett, Sandberg has much to say about female self-sabotage, which she laments because female progress to the top echelons has stalled, and “a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women would be a better world.”
She never says why. Is Greece less immiserated because Angela Merkel, as one of the most prominent voices in the eurozone crisis, is a woman? Am I supposed to cheer if an anti-choice female candidate gets elected to Congress or because Carly Fiorina got to run Hewlett-Packard? Equality is one thing, and a legitimate demand, but a few millennia of oppression doesn’t mean that if women ran things we’d necessarily do it any better, and to think otherwise is sentimental drivel. Nor does a history of inequality make the dumber elements of feminine culture any less grating than the dumber elements of male culture. Remind me why sports metaphors are somehow worse than nonstop cutesiness again? Reading this book felt like clawing my way through snowdrifts of saccharine. My brain felt gooey afterward. An hour of ESPN would have been like a power cleanse. I found myself wondering who Bennett’s target audience could be, since it seems doubtful that anyone who needs to be told to make lists, take time for herself, and find a mentor—advice so familiar it’s like career gal Muzak by this point—hasn’t already learned all this from Lean In.
That’s not to say that the appeal of cutesy feminism to many women is hard to understand, even in a workplace culture that contains the ferociously not-cute sexism of Ailes and his ilk. This book may have sprung from the same impulse that has propelled coinages like mansplainer into the cultural conversation—the push to turn every gender-political issue, no matter how woolly, into a pat little portmanteau that makes for a convenient bloggy shorthand. Women who know that other women crave advice, and that content matters less than form (bullet points, listicles), often go far. Think of Helen Gurley Brown, who built an empire on the relentlessly upbeat message that everything—namely you!—is fixable. I understand the appeal: I too want to be fixed; I too like a little fake uplift now and then. But I also resent, on behalf of my gender, the fact that we apparently need so much fixing.
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Sounds like that book, far from being a slam dunk, fumbled the ball at the line of scrimmage and, unable to recover, suffered a TKO before even making it through the first round, and struck out. More...
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Not unlike Brown, Feminist Fight Club wants us to see that femininity can be toughened up, weaponized even. The tension is that even at its toughest (“womanpropriate that!”) there’s still a fair amount of self-abnegation, which can be as much of an impediment to women’s equality as the remaining tatters of patriarchy. Which is in tatters—in this part of the world anyway—partly because it’s starting to cost too much. Check with Rupert Murdoch, latter-day slayer of sexist dragons. Fight move (with a fist bump to Gretchen Carlson): Get them by the balls—or wallets, if you can tell the difference—and their hearts and minds will follow.