It was a fight clubâbut without the fighting and without the men. Every month, the women would huddle in a friendâs apartment to share sexist job frustrations and trade tips for how best to tackle them. Once upon a time, you might have called them a consciousness-raising group. But the problems of todayâs working world are more subtle, less pronounced, harder to identifyâand, if Ellen Pao is any indication, harder to proveâthan those of their foremothers. These women werenât just there to vent. They needed battle tactics. And so the fight club was born.
Hard-hitting and entertaining, Feminist Fight Club blends personal stories with research, statistics, infographics, and no-bullsh*t expert advice. Bennett offers a new vocabulary for the sexist workplace archetypes women encounter everydayâsuch as the Manterrupter who talks over female colleagues in meetings or the Himitator who appropriates their ideasâand provides practical hacks for navigating other gender landmines in todayâs working world. With original illustrations, Feminist Mad Libs, a Negotiation Cheat Sheet, as well as fascinating historical research and a kit for âHow to Start Your Own Club,â Feminist Fight Club tackles both the external (sexist) and internal (self-sabotaging) behaviors that plague todayâs womenâas well as the system that perpetuates them.
Jessica Bennett is an award-winning journalist and critic. She writes for the New York Times, where she covers gender issues, culture, and has a monthly column on millennials and language. A former staff writer at Newsweek, Jessica is also a contributing editor for LeanIn.org, the nonprofit founded by Sheryl Sandberg, where she is the cofounder and curator of the Lean In Collection, an initiative to change how women are portrayed in stock photography. Yes, she's in a real-life feminist fight club.