Our Holiday Reading Recommendations

The holidays are fast approaching, along with DOJ GEN’s annual round-up—coming soon! In the meantime, if you have time for some extra reading over the winter break, here’s some great stuff on gender equity and equality that came out this year.

• The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published Federal #MeToo: Examining Sexual Harassment in Government Workplaces in 2020, but we’re including it because its unfortunate release at the very beginning of the pandemic diminished the impact it should have had. The report's wide-ranging examination of federal agencies' failures to properly respond to sexual harassment speaks to the systemic problems at DOJ, and offers common-sense recommendations that we’ll continue to urge the Justice Department to adopt. It also discusses the written and oral testimony that DOJ GEN submitted to the Committee.

• In her recent book, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence, Anita Hill provides a comprehensive legal and cultural history of sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence, and offers concrete recommendations for reforms. It’s a page-turner! Professor Hill has focused much of her academic career on gender-based violence, and her many contributions have shifted our understanding of it in immeasurable ways.

• If DOJ GEN had a dime for every piece written about remote work since the pandemic reshaped our lives, we'd have a sizable budget. But this article by Anne Helen Peterson is particularly resonant. We also recommend the recently released book she wrote with Charlie Warzel—Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home—that thoughtfully explores the history and promising future of workplace flexibility.

• Rafia Zacharia—a civil rights lawyer, journalist, and overall badass—pulls no punches in Against White Feminism, an essential critique of the exclusionary and racist tendencies of mainstream feminist movements in the U.S. and throughout the Western world.

• In Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Believe Abusers, Deborah Tuerkheimer, a Northwestern Law professor and former sex crimes prosecutor, interrogates the complicated reasons why law enforcement, lawmakers, courts, and society in general too often distrust victims/survivors of sexual misconduct. She discusses the particular ways in which gender, race, and class compound what she calls the “credibility complex”—a cluster of forces that corrupts what and who we believe.

Let us know if you’ve read anything exceptional recently. And have a safe and happy New Year!