cover image Ladies Get Paid: The Ultimate Guide to Breaking Barriers, Owning Your Worth, and Taking Command of Your Career

Ladies Get Paid: The Ultimate Guide to Breaking Barriers, Owning Your Worth, and Taking Command of Your Career

Claire Wasserman. Gallery, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-1-982126-90-2

Wasserman, founder of the Ladies Get Paid networking site, devotes her helpful debut to breaking down the skills women need in order to succeed in business. It’s still hard for women to get paid fairly, Wasserman writes, whether in terms of financial compensation or respect and power. To remedy this, she walks readers through ways to take control of their careers. In each chapter, she illustrates her points with a relevant case study involving a woman she’s helped. For work-life balance, Wasserman discusses how Amy, after a period of worsening stress at her job, learned to prioritize self-care after overcoming her “lack of understanding of it, its origins, and all the different ways it can be implemented.” Discussing getting past harmful cultural messaging about work, Wasserman relates how Alisha, having chosen a higher-paying but less fulfilling gig as a consultant over her dream job as a writer, realized that “as much as she needed to be right for the company, the company had to be right for her as well.” Questions for self-exploration help readers personalize the tips to their own situation, whether they are floundering at work or just need direction to the next step up the ladder. Though the advice is not particularly new, the encouraging, all-in-this-together tone will be a beacon to women navigating the choppy waters of workplace patriarchy. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, ICM Partners. (Jan.)