Joan C. Williams is a social scientist, a professor of law and author of the new book Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. Williams, who teaches law at the University of California, Hastings, has been researching and writing about work-family issues for more than two decades. She is widely recognized as an expert on how economics, gender and policy come together to shape American lives, sometimes for better, but mostly for worse. In 2000, she wrote the influential book Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It. Williams is one of only five women ever selected to speak at Harvard’s prestigious Massey Lectures. It was out of her lectures at Harvard that her most recent book emerged.

Reshaping the Work-Family Debate shifts the conversation about the conflict between domestic work and market work away from women and on to men. Williams claims that in order to “jump-start the gender revolution,” a phrase that implies the revolution has broken down, we need to change the way we define masculinity. As long as we define “manhood” as working long hours, providing single-handedly for a family and disengaging from care-giving, the revolution will remain stalled. And women will continue to be overworked, underpaid and denied access to the highest ranks of business and politics.

It was an absolute pleasure to sit down with Williams, a woman who has thought long and hard about one of the greatest challenges facing not just feminism, but American society.

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Joan C. Williams.

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