In Women speaking up Ford examines the discursive practices of women in the workplace. Drawing upon more than twenty hours of videotaped workplace meetings in medical, scientific, university, and nonprofit organizations, the author documents women's skills in getting and using turns in workplace meetings and making themselves heard in male-dominated workplace settings. Ford challenges the widely held notions of gender difference and women's deficient language use, and shows women's turns as exemplars of skills required by both men and women to participate in workplace meetings effectively.

Ch. 1 sets the scene by introducing the research as a feminist project and situating the study in the broader field of language and gender, while Ch. 2 describes the data collection process and the analytical framework used in the book. Adopting conversation analytic methods, Ford intends to present a detailed analysis of turn taking, the use of questions to present challenges and open participation, and the interactional skills needed to effectively raise issues that go against the ideas of co-workers in senior positions. Ch. 3 moves on to present data collected from interviews with individual women in order to find out about their own perspectives on their participation in meetings.

Chs. 4, 5 and 6 constitute the body of the analysis. In Ch. 4, Ford analyzes how women get and use turns in meetings, with particular attention to how they achieve a shift in the meeting order. It is shown that they are capable of gaining the floor by making nonvocal and vocal bids for turns, and by making connections and alliances with other speakers through crediting and naming previous speakers. Ch. 5 is devoted to exploring the role of questions in opening participation, displaying expertise, and presenting challenges during meetings. While asking questions is often associated with a lack of power, Ford's analysis shows that questions allow speakers to expand their contributions and open up the discourse to others. As the analysis demonstrates, women skillfully use questions to challenge ideas, sometimes even embedding opposing arguments in questions themselves. Ch. 6 specifically focuses on two women's discourse in meetings. In particular, Ford shows how they shape disaffiliative actions in affiliative ways, with the ultimate goal of achieving agreement. Ford shows how the women make use of politeness strategies to mitigate their disaffiliative talk and downplay potentially threatening actions. They also use humor and other distancing techniques to establish rapport with recipients of their disafilliative actions. In addition, they take advantage of their relationships with other participants by alternately positioning themselves as insiders or outsiders, equal co-workers or subordinates. Ch. 7 summarizes the findings of the book and documents how the author shared her research findings with the group of women she studied, with the intention of raising their awareness of the use of effective linguistic strategies in meetings.

Overall, Ford's book offers refreshing insights into women's linguistic performance in the workplace, challenging popular stereotypes concerning women's incompetent language use. It is indeed a valuable and timely addition to the field of sociolinguistics, particularly the subfield of language and gender. It is a solid, well-written, and well-structured text, making significant contributions to affirming women's linguistic competence in using and getting turns in workplace meetings, as well as celebrating their wide linguistic repertoires. I would highly recommend the book to researchers who are engaged in research on sociolinguistics, language and gender, conversation analysis, and language in the workplace.