The Center for WorkLife Law is an advocacy and research organization at UC Hastings Law that seeks to advance racial, gender, and class equity. At WorkLife Law, we address inequality at a structural level by developing and implementing concrete, evidence-based interventions in schools and workplaces and changing public policy at the state and national levels. We are extremely strategic in how we approach each structural intervention, forging partnerships with grassroots groups and field experts to identify the best change levers to tackle the problem at hand. With our interventions, we aim to produce dramatic changes within a two to five year timeframe. Our main areas of impact are economic security, maternal & child health, education equity, and racial and gender justice in the workplace. Throughout the pandemic, our team has also mobilized a COVID-19 emergency response, applying our legal expertise to help protect workers’ rights during the crisis.
These are just some of the problems that U.S. workers currently face. At the Center for WorkLife Law, we intervene on these problems through both systems-level change and individual interventions.
Our partners at Ice Miller LLP created a toolkit for interrupting bias in their interview process and employed a data-driven approach to tackling retention issues at their organization. These resources are now available on www.biasinterrupters.org to help more organizations level the playing field for advancement.
WorkLife Law has received funding from Walmart to work with six companies to pilot its “Bias Interrupters” program: evidence-based metrics-driven tools for interrupting racial and gender bias in informal workplace interactions and HR systems.
The six companies selected for the pilot program will be our partners in producing rigorous research to establish best practices for leveling the playing field for all employees. WorkLife Law is dedicated to quantifying the real-life impact of gender, race, and class bias in workplaces and excited to partner with the six companies to generate and advance evidence-based strategies to improve the workplace experience for all employees.
The Center’s Deputy Director, Liz Morris, published a letter to the editor in the New York Times about bias against mothers and how that contributes to the gender pay gap. Read the letter here.
