Joan C. Williams is a Distinguished Professor of Law, Hastings Foundation Chair and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings Law. She is one of the most cited scholar in her field and is the author (or co-author) of a dozen books and over a hundred academic articles. She holds an honorary PhD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands for her research on workplace bias.

Williams is known for leading original research as well as disseminating social psychology research on gender and racial bias in professional workplaces widely. She has co-authored a series of influential reports on racial and gender bias in STEM, engineering, the legal profession and architecture. She is widely known for “bias interrupters” -- an evidence-based, metrics-driven approach to eradicating implicit bias introduced in the Harvard Business Review in 2014.

Williams’s book Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real for Good (forthcoming, November 2021) provides a clear roadmap for CEOs, HR, DEI, managers and individuals seeking to make tangible progress toward their DEI goals.