That's What She Said: What Men and Women Need to Know about Working Together

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The world has changed in the wake of the #MeToo movement. What comes next? Going beyond the message of Lean In and The Confidence Code, Joanne Lippman, Gannett’s Chief Content Officer, offers solutions to help professionals solve gender gap issues and achieve parity at work in this inclusive and realistic handbook. Newly updated by the author to include a cheat sheet for taking positive action now, this timely, essential book also offers tools for having tough―but necessary―discussions.

Companies with more women in senior leadership perform better by virtually every financial measure, and women employees help boost creativity and can temper risky behavior―such as the financial gambles behind the 2008 economic collapse. Yet in the United States, ninety-five percent of Fortune 500 chief executives are men, and women hold only seventeen percent of seats on corporate boards. More men are reaching across the gender divide, genuinely trying to reinvent the culture and transform the way we work together. Despite these good intentions, fumbles, missteps, frustration, and misunderstanding continue to inflict real and lasting damage on women’s careers.

What can the Enron scandal teach us about the way men and women communicate professionally? How does brain circuitry help explain men’s fear of women’s emotions at work? Why did Kimberly Clark blindly have an all-male team of executives in charge of their Kotex tampon line? In That’s What She Said, veteran media executive Joanne Lipman raises these intriguing questions and more to find workable solutions that individual managers, organizations, and policy makers can employ to make work more equitable and rewarding for all professionals.

Filled with illuminating anecdotes, data from the most recent relevant studies, and stories from Lipman’s own journey to the top of a male-dominated industry, That’s What She Said is a book about success that persuasively shows why empowering women as true equals is an essential goal for us all―and offers a roadmap for getting there.

This essential book moves beyond the blame game to offer a clear, actionable guide for men and women to build a better workplace together, including:

• Unconscious Bias: Discover why well-intentioned people still make biased decisions, and learn proven techniques to de-bias hiring, promotions, and daily interactions.
• Men as Allies: Move beyond the “men are the enemy” narrative with concrete strategies that bring men into the conversation, showing why gender parity benefits everyone.
• Closing the Gender Pay Gap: Understand why women often don’t ask for a raise—and what managers can do right now to ensure fair compensation and equal opportunity.
• Gender Dynamics at Work: Explore real-world case studies from Enron to the tech industry that reveal how men and women communicate differently, and what to do to bridge that divide.
• Women in Leadership: Get a practical roadmap for organizations to empower women, remove systemic barriers, and achieve true parity in the C-suite and beyond.

Joanne Lipman has authored a pioneering journalism career. She was the first female Deputy Managing Editor at the Wall Street Journal, where she created the Weekend Journal and Personal Journal sections and oversaw the creation of the paper’s Saturday edition. She was founding editor-in-chief of Conde Nast Portfolio magazine. And she served as Editor-in-Chief at USA Today and Chief Content Officer at Gannet. Under her editorship, she led these organizations to numerous awards, including six Pulitzer Prizes. Dubbed “star editor” by CNN, she is author of the No. 1 national bestseller That’s What She Said, about closing the gender gap, and coauthor of the music memoir Strings Attached. She is a lecturer at Yale University’s Department of Political Science and was the Peretsman Scully Distinguished Journalism Fellow at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. Lipman is a contributor to CNBC.