Work-life Movement “Rock Star” Takes On How Understanding Class Could Transform Caregiving Policy
Interview with Joan Williams, author of "Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win them Back"
Blog Post

May 28, 2025
Joan Williams is a pioneer who has always led from way out front. A legal scholar and professor, researcher, author of 12 books, 116 academic articles and a life-long feminist, she has been called a “rock star” in the work-family movement.
Now, with the publication of her new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win them Back, she’s trying to reshape how we think about class in this country, and how a shift in thinking will bolster caregiver-friendly policies.

If anyone can do that it’s Williams. She pioneered the legal theory of “family responsibilities discrimination” that has influenced policy at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and countless workplace policies. She’s developed a set of evidence-based and practical “bias interrupters” that organizations can use to promote fairness at work. She founded the Center for Work-Life Law and, more recently, the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco.
At the start of her career, work-family issues were often seen as “mommy issues,” and were focused on professional women and the question of whether they should work for pay outside the home or not; on single mothers in poverty and what public benefits they “deserved;” or on the effort to get more college-educated women into corner offices. But Williams saw a much, much bigger picture. She was one of the first work-family scholars to bring men into the conversation, and to show how work-family issues differ depending on what class you’re in. And she’s tied how work-family issues are central to the economy and quality of life.
And now, she’s out front again. This time, with her new book on class. In it, Williams argues how understanding class is key to winning the kind of family-supportive public policies, workplace practices and cultural attitudes that will enable all of us to more easily combine work and care. I spoke with Williams, a long-time friend and mentor and, gratefully, a member of the Better Life Lab’s Advisory Council, and asked her to explain why.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Brigid Schulte: Joan, you’ve spent your career as a real pioneer in rethinking gender equality and work-family issues. Can you walk us through the journey of how you got here, to focusing on class and politics, and what that means for the future of work, family, gender and care?
Joan Williams: I've been writing about social class for 25 years. I wrote about it extensively in my initial book, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to do about it, which was published in 2000. I’ve always been attuned to the fact that the traditional breadwinner-homemaker roles were much more cherished in the middle of the income distribution than they are at the top. There's this irony that, when it comes to gender roles, elites tend to talk the talk, but they don't tend to walk the walk. Over 70 percent of men in the top 1 percent had the favored career in their families.
Among the settled middle class, the middle 50 percent of the income distribution whom I'll call the “missing middle,” they have always been more loyal to gender traditions than either the rich or the poor. If you think about it, they can't attain class ideals, but they can attain gender ideals, which of course is what Trump is trying to offer them: “You may not earn enough to support your family, but you should, and you're a real man. And voting for me shows that you're a real man.”
There's Catalist polling data showing that, contrary to early exit polling which suggested no gain in the gender gap, in fact, there was a very substantial gain in the gender gap in 2024. That Trump chiefly attracted men. [While women’s support of the Democratic presidential candidate remained fairly stable, around 55 percent, men swung right: from 48 percent voting Democratic in 2020 to 42 percent in 2024, a 13-point gender gap, up from 9 points in 2020. The gender gap was largest among young voters, at 17 points.]
So gender looks different depending on your class status.
Schulte: So how did that understanding of class and gender roles inform your work?
Williams: I was focused on that, first, because I was trying to build a coalition around work-family public policy. I recognized that the kind of rhetoric that my crowd often uses, which is very critical of breadwinner-homemaker roles, was going to be very off-putting to many people that we needed to build a coalition with. The work that I've done has always been informed by social class because my goal has been to put into effect changes that are achievable in a two-to-five year timeframe, or to describe why that's not possible.
Second, another important part, which is basically what Heather Boushey and I described in The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals and the Missing Middle, is that what work-life conflict means differs depending on your class location.
If you're in a low-wage or pink-collar job, work-family conflict often means extremely unstable schedules with not enough hours to survive on. Your schedule changes typically from day to day and week to week. So you can't really hold another part-time job at the same time.
It took a while for the work-family movement to recognize that the specific policy changes they were demanding were more relevant to professional women than they were to women who weren't professionals.
Schulte: Work Flexibility.
Williams: Yes.
But the third thing that really is the reason I started to think about class dynamics in American politics was in response to the question of why we have the most family hostile public policy order around work-family issues in the developed world, which I wrote about 25 years ago.
And despite passage [in 2022] of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, the one major piece of federal legislation that's passed—in 25 years, we still have the most family hostile public policy in the developed world today.
The reason that we do stems from exactly the class dynamics that I'm describing in this book, because they're the same class dynamics that are fueling far-right populism.
One of the things that is not well known enough is that this missing middle is far less in favor of government redistribution than either the rich or the poor are. The missing middle is pretty hostile to government redistribution. This makes sense if you think about their lives. These are people who have to get up every day and go to work on time, without an attitude, to jobs where they're order takers. Sometimes they get personal satisfaction out of the job. A lot of the time they don't.They can't understand why, if they have to go and show up at a job that sucks, other people should be given benefits that mean they don't have to go to a job that sucks. And of course, that's how the right has always presented benefits.
There's also another very specific thing, which I'm not sure the movement has ever really come to terms with. Paid family leave, which of course is so important and it's truly bizarre that we don't have it. We're one of the only countries, as you well know, in the world that doesn't.
Schulte: Right. One of two in the world—Papua New Guinea— with no paid maternity leave. One of a handful, along with others in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with no paid paternity leave. One of the few, including South Korea and Somalia with no paid sick days nor, along with India, Pakistan and Myanmar, no paid annual leave.
Williams: But in a country like the United States, where virtually all of the net growth in new jobs in the 15 years before Trump was first elected was in gig and short term work, the idea that you get paid leave when you have a full-time job is of limited interest to people who no longer have access to stable full-time jobs.
And that's something I don't think the movement has really ever come to terms with. That's not saying that paid family leave is unimportant. It's saying that it's going to be felt as more important depending on what class you're in. Which is, I know, sad to recognize, but it's also true.
And not just for the missing middle, but more generally, support for government redistribution is lower in the United States than it is in most European countries. That's the bad news, and one of the main reasons we don't have the kind of family supports that we ought to.
But one of the things that you recognize if you study this missing middle group, which is what this book does, is that there's actually much, much higher support among this missing middle, often called the working class, for what's sometimes called pre-distribution as opposed to redistribution. That's just a fancy term for a fair labor market.
Schulte: Good jobs.
Williams: Yes. A fair labor market is a central value for the left. What I'm hoping to help accomplish in this book is that both the right and the left can get behind the idea that hard work should pay off in a stable middle class life.
You should have access to one full-time job that helps support a family. You have benefits. You can afford childcare, which of course is not true in the missing middle.
Schulte: And not true for a lot of people.
Williams: One of the reasons the missing middle looks back with such affection on traditional gender roles is because of what's replaced it, which is families trying to patch together a middle-class life on five part-time jobs with no childcare. And tag teaming, with three-to-six-times the nationals divorce rate.
So often, this is spoken of as nostalgia for white privilege. And that definitely captures an important dynamic, because working-class white people were much more likely than same-class people of color to see their wages rise to match productivity gains in the decades after World War II.
But it's also just true that this missing middle looks back on breadwinner-homemaker families because when they had breadwinner-homemaker families, life was less fragile and less frantic than the current five-part-time-jobs without child care model.
Schulte: That’s one of the things I talk about in my book, Over Work, what I called the “crappification” of work over the last few decades, and the need to make all jobs good jobs, big enough to support human life. So how do we get from here to there?
Williams: We have to start from scratch and rebuild a multi-racial coalition with the non-college educated voters that are flocking to the far right.
Sometimes people say to me, “I thought you were a gender person.” Another set of people who know me from a series of studies I did on women of color, think of me as a “race person.” So sometimes people are surprised that I’m talking so much about class in politics. But class is what's driving American politics.
The Democrats have become predominantly a party of college grads. And non-college-educated people, in huge numbers, have defected to MAGA Republicans and Trump.
That's been true for white working-class voters since 2016. But one of the shocking things in 2024, there were also large shifts away from Democrats by people of color: 30 points or more among people of color without college degrees and 40 points or more among young people of color.
And so, although racism is always an important dynamic in American politics, it no longer is feasible to say this swing to the right is just about a bunch of racists, “and we couldn't possibly try to build a coalition with them without giving into racism.” Racism is the one of the strongest predictors of votes for Trump, that's true.
But that's not why he won in 2016, because that's not a large enough vote share. There just, thank the Lord, aren't enough of these racists to vote him in. Trump wins because he also gains the votes of people whose racial attitudes don't differ a lot from those of non-Trump voters. A key reason they're voting for him is because he talks about bringing back good, solid middle class jobs.
Now, there’s a little problem: he lies. That's not what he does. That's not what he did last time. That's not what he's doing this time. Biden, in fact, tried to do that. But Trump does several things that endear him, or make him attractive, to these people in the missing middle: in 2024, one key thing he did was to center his campaign on inflation and the economy.
Democrats were busy talking about defense of democracy and abortion rights. For me, abortion rights is one of my deepest political commitments. But I'm also clear-eyed enough to recognize that college grads of every racial group support abortion rights at higher rates than non-college grads.
Defense of democracy, of course, seems like such a logical focus right now. If you look at the Democrats who voted in 2024, it was one of their top issues. But if you look at Trump voters, it was way, way down.
And so why are these people so shockingly not interested in the defense of democracy? You have to go back to the fact that wages used to rise when productivity did in the decades after World War II. If that had continued, wages would be 43 percent higher.
Schulte: Wow.
Williams: It's true that Republicans haven't done anything about that. But these missing middle voters think Democrats haven't either. What they've seen good jobs disappear. They've seen massive disinvestment in large areas of the country because, although we now understand that neoliberalism fueled inequality of incomes among individuals, what's less understood is that neoliberalism also fueled inequality between regions in the United States and elsewhere.
Virtually all of the economic growth went to the creative class in the superstar cities. The classic question, “What's the matter with Kansas? Why are they voting against their own self-interest?:The answer is that Kansas is angry that so little of the economic growth and investment has gone to places where they grew up that they're very loyal to. Their kids can't get jobs there. No one can get jobs there, which of course is one of the things that fueled the opioid epidemic. They think that the system has really failed them. And it has.
There was also nearly a 20-point shift away from Democrats with young people. It was very, very shocking. And I think these are the young people who can only get short-term or gig or or who are living in these superstar cities vans can’t afford to buy a house, or who have children and can’t afford child care. They're as angry about their situation as the missing middle is about its economic situation.
For Democrats to be presenting themselves as defenders of the system, it's just not a good look. It's going to further empower the far right and make it even more impossible to get some kind of sane family policy.
So, we need to build a coalition focused around economic issues. Not blue collar jobs, but all kinds of jobs: pink-collar jobs, the routine white-collar jobs where people are not getting their fair share of productivity gains over recent decades. If you look at the polling, and my book goes into this in depth—70 to 87 percent of Americans believe that the rich are paid too much and everybody else is paid too little.
I'm not talking here just about the minimum wage. That's so important for low-income people. But it is not what these missing middle wants anymore than you or I want our kids to be stuck in a minimum wage job. What non-college grads want is what most older college grads have always had: a good, solid job that can support a family, with the house, the car, the washing machine: the basics of a middle-class life.
Schulte: So, one, rebuild a coalition focused on a fair labor market and economic issues. What else?
Williams: Develop cultural competence.
One of the reasons the Democratic party has become a party of college graduates is because of what are called class-based taste cultures. Democrats sound like college graduates talking to other college graduates. In the missing middle, the taste culture is much more attuned to what Trump does: He presents as authentic, blunt, direct. “He doesn't sugar coat things,” said one Trump voter.
When Democrats tend to talk in terms of complex 17-point policy proposals and platforms that sends the message that, “College grads are the key audience, and the only audience that matters.” We need to learn to talk to non-college grads in the language that feels natural for them. This is totally possible for Democrats to do. Think of [Michigan Democratic Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer saying, “Fix the damn roads.” She's tying her policies to people's everyday lives. She's saying it in very simple, punchy language.
Democrats can do this. They just haven't. And one of the reasons they haven't is because the college-educated base feels entitled to be spoken to like, “Oh, we're intelligent people.” In other words, using elite talk traditions that signal, “I'm an intelligent person speaking to you, an intelligent person.” That's only one of the ways in which Democrats have unwittingly chosen sides in class wars that they really don't understand.
Schulte: What does all this mean for the future of work, family, gender and care, and shifting the country from family-hostile to family-supportive public policies?
Williams: My message is, if you care about paid leave, if you care about climate change, if you care about abortion rights, if you care about the defense of democracy, you better care about the votes of non-college educated Americans. Because nearly two-thirds of Americans didn't graduate from college. Democrats, progressives and work-family advocates are not going to be able to achieve any family policies unless they find a way to connect with non-college graduates. That’s just the numbers. We've got to change this political dynamic before we have any glimmer of a hope of getting things like a decent childcare system and reasonable leave.
We’ve got to say to people, “Hard work should pay off in America,” and rebuild our coalition. That’s the only way we are going to get anywhere close to the care work issues that you and I care about so much.