In her book Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules of Success, Ivanka Trump writes that changing “the narrative around women and work once and for all” has become her life’s mission. With this book, she purportedly hopes to “provide solutions” for women who have jobs and personal lives. “Like you,” she ends her introduction rather pithily, “I’m a woman who works—at every aspect of my life.” But if Ivanka is a woman who works, then who are the people who thought of the “solutions” that Ivanka borrows and sells as her own? At whose expense does Ivanka profit?
Numerous reviews of the book, including that of Jezebel’s Stassa Edwards, note that Women Who Work is more of a trophy for Ivanka than it is any sort of useful text. In it, she speaks directly to women who are like her: wealthy, with resources, in a job with enough flexibility and stability that calling a meeting with your boss to say you just have to leave the office at 5 p.m. to care for your children is enough to engender permanent mutual respect and a livable work-life balance. But the book is also a brazen work of aggregation, in which Ivanka patches together the careers of a group of professional coaches, psychologists, and prominent motivators to create something that is somehow less than the sum of its parts; a cheapened, superficial Pinterest board of ideas, bound together by little other than the fact that Ivanka has decided that they support her personal brand.
The book doesn’t claim to be something it isn’t. Towards the beginning, she writes how much she respects the writers and thinkers who have delved into what it means to be a professional woman—Anne-Marie Slaughter, Brigid Schulte, and Sheryl Sandberg top the list. And then she writes:
Inspired by these women—and bolstered by conversations I’ve had, and those happening around me—I’ve curated my best thinking, as well as that of so many others, in the pages of this book. I’ve gathered the most important and essential advice that we shared on IvankaTrump.com, plus my favorite books, TED Talks, podcasts, and other resources to help women come together to celebrate how we can achieve success on our own terms, measured by our own individual passions and priorities.
Of the 70,000 words in her book, almost 23,000 (approximately 33 percent) are, literally, not her words—that is, they’re quotations or bulleted guides from another writer. There are, by my count, 468 source citations at the back of the book, and CNN reporter Betsy Klein counts over 130 names referenced at some point throughout. And these aren’t regular academic citations that work together to form a new, original thesis. Instead, Ivanka cites frequently and heavily, often using uninterrupted paragraphs from other books, in places she could easily paraphrase or draw from her own life.
At one point, she references the story of a former Senate staffer, except she doesn’t tell her story—she lifts it almost verbatim from Lean In:
In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg tells the story of Cynthia Hogan, who “served as chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee under then-senator Joe Biden before leaving in 1996 after her first child was born. Her plan was to return to the workforce a few years later. But when her second child was born prematurely,” Sandberg writes, “those plans changed. A full twelve years later, Vice President-Elect Biden called Cynthia to ask her to join his staff as chief legal counsel in the White House.” She wasn’t sure “whether she could manage the long hours in the White House and still see her family. . . . ‘I knew that whether this would work depended on two men. So first I asked my husband if he could step in and take on more of the responsibility for the kids. . . . And then I told the Vice President-Elect that I really wanted to have dinner with my kids most nights. And his response was, ‘Well, you have a phone and I can call you when I need you after dinnertime.’ . . . Being forthright led to opportunity.”
There are at least two instances of the book lifting language without proper citation, as far as I could tell. Ivanka writes about preparing to speak at the Republican National Convention, and offers “a few strategies I employed,” that others with public speaking engagements can use. In the tips that follow, she uses language identical to language published on Wharton professor and author Adam Grant’s blog in 2014, republished on HuffPost in 2015, and partially republished as a “cheat sheet” on IvankaTrump.com in February 2016. (Bolding is mine.)
From Women Who Work:
PRACTICE IN FRONT OF PEOPLE: Classic studies by the late Stanford psychologist Robert Zajonc demonstrated that the mere presence of other people raises our awareness. If you practice alone, you won’t have a chance to adjust to that factor. When practicing for the RNC, I lined my kids up on the couch and made them listen to me countless times! Rehearse over and over again, out loud. If you keep stumbling on the same sentence or word, change it.
From Grant’s blog:
2. Practice in front of an audience. When I rehearsed my early speeches, I delivered them solo. Classic studies by the late Stanford psychologist Robert Zajonc demonstrated that the mere presence of other people raises our arousal. If you practice alone, you won’t have a chance to adjust to that arousal.
Several lines down, in a tip called “RENAME YOUR ANXIETY ‘EXCITEMENT,’” she goes on to quote Grant, but not a quote that appears in that blog post. The initial post is not cited, but the IvankaTrump.com condensed reprint is, in the Notes section at the end of the book.
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