Rationalizing the Workplace w/ Prof. Vicki Schultz (Yale Law)

Professor Vicki Schultz, Yale Law School: Rationalizing the Workplace: Title VII’s Legacy of Fairness for All and Today’s Anti-DEI Movement

Vicki Schultz is the Ford Foundation Professor of Law and Social Science at Yale Law School, where she teaches constitutional law, employment discrimination law, family law, work and gender, and other courses related to labor and civil rights. She runs the Workplace Theory and Policy workshop at Yale. Schultz has written widely on work and gender issues, including sexual harassment, job segregation, work-family dynamics, job insecurity, household labor, and the meaning of work in people’s lives. Her work emphasizes the need for structural solutions to problems often perceived as individual failings. Her articles have reshaped the way people think about sex-based harassment in legal, social science, management, and activist circles. Her work has highlighted the importance of work to people’s identity and security: She was an early voice cautioning against the social and economic breakdown that would accompany rise of gig labor, a trend that has only accelerated in the platform economy.

Schultz is currently working on a history of the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division’s Employment Section from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, when trial lawyers there helped desegregate the American workforce by bringing Title VII pattern or practice suits. Other long-term projects also include a conceptual history of affirmative action law and an analysis of the effects of marriage on equality. Schultz is currently the Secretary of the AALS Section on Employment Discrimination and a former chair of the AALS Labor and Employment Section. She’s the proud mom of a Yale graduate and a rescue dachshund.