That’s What She Said: What Men Need to Know and Women Need to Tell Them About Working Together

Lipman (Strings Attached), editor-in-chief of USA Today, makes a bold statement with this important book examining biases favoring men in business. In this road map to empowerment, Lipman explains that it’s not just men who devalue their female colleagues’ work, but also the women themselves, as perhaps most tellingly illustrated by a survey of social-psychology studies observing this phenomenon beginning in childhood. To be sure, readers will learn here of companies actively addressing gender imbalances. Lipman commends Blake Irving of GoDaddy, a company once notorious for sexist advertising, for becoming an outspoken proponent of equal pay. Elsewhere she observes that after the U.S.’s leading symphony orchestras began blind auditions, wherein auditioning musicians perform behind a screen, female representation skyrocketed, from 5% in 1970 to nearly 50% today— a tactic she finds applicable to the business world. According to one dramatic figure Lipman cites, encouraging women who gave up work for motherhood to rejoin the labor pool could add as much as $2.1 trillion to the U.S. economy. This book goes a step further than Sheryl Sandberg’s bestselling Lean In and challenges both men and women to examine their own prejudices and actively reshape work cultures to be more welcoming to women. (Feb.)