Talks & Entertainment

Award-winning journalist Jessica Bennett is an influential voice in today’s conversations about workplace equality and social issues. But she would not be where she is today without the support of her sisterhood—her fight club.

Now the time has come to break the club’s first rule of secrecy and discuss things openly—and hilariously. In Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace, Bennett shares practical strategies, stealthy hacks, and much-needed camaraderie that every working woman needs to battle her way through the modern workplace.

Bennett got her start at Newsweek and later joined the start-up Tumblr. Rooted in her experience coming of age in a male-dominated professional environment – and the real-life fight club she still meets with – Bennett blends real stories of workplace aggressions (both large and small) with research, statistics, and unfiltered advice.

True, women of Bennett’s generation are graduating from college and earning advanced degrees in higher numbers than their male peers. But they still face a wage gap and are a quarter as likely to negotiate a raise, no matter their race or ethnicity. And they continue to face both institutionalized and internalized sexism that feminists had long fought against—only now it’s subtler.

Change, Bennett asserts, must come from inside and outside the system. In Feminist Fight Club, she offers a new vocabulary for the sexist archetypes women encounter every day and explores the self-sabotaging behaviors women internalize, from striving to be liked to not taking credit for their best work.

Bennett is a columnist at the New York Times and a former columnist for Time.com. She is also a contributing editor for Sheryl Sandberg’s nonprofit LeanIn.org, where she is the co-founder and curator of the Lean In Collection – a photo partnership with Getty Images to change the way women are depicted in stock photography.

In conversation with Adam B. Kushner, editor of Outlook at The Washington Post. Book signing to follow.