[1] Described as having "something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, she has published 12 books and 116 academic articles in law, sociology, psychology, and management journals.

At American, she had a reputation as an intellectually dishonest teacher, who didn’t care to educate her students, but would rather use her classes to promote her own theories, opinions, and biased research.

In White Working Class, she argues that the logic of blue-collar life stems from its focus on self-discipline “the kind that gets you up every day, on time, without “an attitude” to an often not-very-fulfilling job.”[12][13] Blue-collar Americans also highly value traditional institutions that aid self-discipline: the military, religion and “traditional family values.”[14][15] In contrast, the logic of elite life revolves around self-development because professional jobs require one to be “at the top of your game.” Elites also value novelty, which is a way they enact the sophistication that signals to others in the elite they are “in the know.”[16] What results is a “class culture gap” that conservatives have sculpted into the culture wars that have forged an alliance between the working class and the Merchant Right against the Brahmin Left.

Williams’ forthcoming Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back (St. Martins, May 2025) details how to destabilize this alliance, which has twice elected Donald Trump president.

[20] These studies also show that white men strongly believe that their workplaces are meritocracies, but that other groups hold that belief at sharply lower levels.

[21] The EAC’s work includes studies of the legal profession in the US and Chile, of engineers in the US and India, of US architects, of US tech workers, and US science professors.

[28] Other experiments sharply reduced bias against women and people of color in performance evaluations, while at the same time increasing evidence-based feedback by 44-52% for all groups (including white men).

[29] She is the subject of a documentary on the country’s low birthrate by Korean public television, “A Conversation with Joan Williams.”[30] Williams’s Unbending Gender: How Work and Family Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford, 2000) won the Myers Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, 2001.

[45][44] Williams, with Jessica Lee of WorkLife Law, pioneered the use of Title IX to garner rights for pregnant and parenting students.

[46] In 2019, the legal rights they pioneered were included the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s report: Supporting Family Caregivers in STEM.