Sexism, Sexual Harassment, and Other Forms of Discrimination

Avoiding the Mommy Track: How Does Having a Family Affect Your Career

Ms. JD — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:59:21 -0600

Editor's Note: Ms. JD's annual conference, Avenues to Advancement, was held November 20-21, 2009, in Chicago. These are six tips from the Motherhood panel.

One of the biggest questions a young female lawyer often wants to know is how having a family will affect her career. Our panelists spoke candidly about how having families has affected their careers and offered tips for being having both a busy career and a busy family. Below are six pieces of advice the panelists offered for making sure that having a family does not alter the career path you want to take.

1. Make yourself missable.

Yes, this sounds a bit corny, but the premise is very important. If you make yourself an integral part of the team and establish a reputation for doing the best work, then when you have to be out of the office for a period of time, you’ll be missed, not replaced.

2. Stay connected

Before you have a child, do things to stay connected to your co-workers and your supervisors. Get your name out there and when you’re away, keep in touch with your network. If you already have children, use your network as much as you need so you don’t miss out on the good work and the best opportunities.

3. Find a mentor who will advocate on your behalf

This is very important. If early on you establish connections with mentors who have leadership positions in your company or workplace, you can be assured that your name will stay in the game. So find someone who wants to help you out, prove to that person you’re worth helping and then keep in close contact to ensure your name is the one being said when important work is being handed out and promotions are being considered.

4. Manage your workload.

Moving up in a company or organization is about quality of work, not quantity. Consider the difference between document review and contributing to a brief. Sure, you may not always get the best work, but make sure you are doing work that advances your career to balance the work that may be more monotonous. And when you have less interesting work, think about ways you can make the job you’re doing a more integral part of the bigger picture.

5. Build a strong support system.

Whether it is family, coworkers or friends, remember that you may have to rely on your support system a lot as you build your career. So find a group of people that can help ease your load, whether it is at work or at home.

6. Realize that your life may not take the path you expected.

As in so many other panels, the panelists here stressed flexibility! Life will not always go the way you want and you may find that the job you thought was perfect is actually keeping you from doing things you find more important, so stay flexible and be open to opportunities that allow you to balance your life in the way you think is best.

Moderator: Ellen Ostrow, Founder, Lawyers Life Coach; Asilia Backus, Associate, Littler Mendelson; Lauren Hennessey Breit, Attorney Human Resources Director, Kirkland & Ellis; Diana Doyle, Partner, Latham & Watkins; Stacy Smith Walsh, Associate, Day Pitney

Gender & U.S. Supreme Court Oral Argument

jessie — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:34:52 -0600

Recently Professors James Cleith Phillips and Edward Carter, from Boalt and BYU respectively, posted their research on the impact of gender in Supreme Court oral arguments. The study analyzed over 13,000 sentences from 57 cases between 2004-2009, measuring Justices’ levels of information-seeking and word counts. Statistical analysis of the individual Justices showed that having the same gender as the arguing attorney did influence judicial behavior for some of the Court. Highlights from the paper include:

Percentage of attorneys that are women among all cases in:
- 2005: 11.11%
- 2006: 14.67%
- 2007: 16.19%
- 2008: 15.54%
Gender does matter, but not the gender of the Justice. Justice Ginsburg behaved no differently than her male colleagues who shared her liberal ideology. However, the gender of the attorney did matter, and interestingly its effects can be parsed based along a fairly consistent partisan divide.
Conservative Justices tend to engage in less information seeking (or more verbal control) with female attorneys overall, regardless of the political ideology those attorneys represent. By comparison, liberal Justices tend to engage in more information seeking (or less verbal control) with female attorneys overall and with female attorneys representing a conservative position.
All the Justices tend to use more words when addressing female attorneys, regardless of whether they were information seeking or not.

This adds to a growing body of research (and controversy) about the role gender plays in the judiciary. There is plenty of fodder for those who argue that women judge cases differently. Whether or not that's true, this study suggests that they treat female attorneys the same way male judges do: differently than male attorneys.

Finding the Silver Lining in a Cloud of Discrimination

jessie — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:09:03 -0600

Since the lay-offs this spring a lot of lawyers who still have jobs have found themselves with a significantly increased workload. For one lawyer the increase wasn't just in volume but in kind: when her department lost a number of her male colleagues she finally got to write a brief.

Recently I got to catch up with an old friend who's been working for a big firm in a relatively small litigation department. Initially she'd been struggling to serve in something more than a support role. She found herself and other women in her department relegated to discreet research and revision roles while her male counterparts were given lead roles writing full briefs.

Then the downturn forced firms to cut their numbers. We know from recent work by NAWL and PAR that while women represent a disproportionate number of the part-time attorneys who were let go. But among full-time attorneys men were laid off proportionate to their numbers. I would argue that a wage gap between male and female attorneys may play a role in this, but I digress.

My friend kept her job, while a number of men in her department moved on. And finally her department head had no choice but to give her the good work. Now she's had 6 solid months of it and there's a downside to the upside to the downturn: she's exhausted.

Meanwhile the department has begun filling in the holes left by her male colleagues' departures. Once again the new men have gotten good assignments right from the start while the women are disproportionately assigned database projects and other less substantive work.

All in all a classic failure to effectively nurture promising young female talent, but at least someone got some good experience out of this mess, even if only for a short time.

What Men Missed When They Missed The Catalyst Release of “Women of Color in US Law Firms”

Ms. JD — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:19:30 -0600

By Brande Stellings, J.D. and Jennifer Kohler

It was easy to talk to the men in the audience at the Catalyst release event for our latest research report, Women of Color in US Law Firms. There were only two. In retrospect, while the event was successful – bringing together a wide array of practitioners from the government, public, and private sector – almost all the attendees were women. Something is wrong with that picture.

Undoubtedly, these women are well-positioned to make change; many are senior partners and others hold influential positions within local government. Nevertheless, considering that men hold 82% of the partnership positions at law firms, it was discouraging not to see more men attending an event designed to provide insight into the experiences of one quarter of their firm’s women associates. And frankly, it wasn’t smart business.

We know women of color are entering and graduating from law schools in increasing numbers, but more than 75% of women of color associates leave their firms by their fifth year. Previous Catalyst research has demonstrated that when a lawyer leaves a firm, the cost to the employer is equal to, or even greater than, their total annual salary and benefits.

We also know that:

Clients are diverse and are pressing law firms to provide teams which better reflect this diversity.

'The Mismeasure of Women' - Joanne Lipman Advocates a Change in the Conversation About Women

Kat — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:24:40 -0600

In her recent article for the New York Times, Joanne Lipman, a former deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal and founding editor in chief of Conde Nast Portfolio magazine, makes the case for re-assessing the way that we measure the progress of women.

With the recent release of the Shriver Report, finding, among other things, that mothers are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families, all indications point to the fact that women have truly made major advances. Lipman argues, however, that "women haven't come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago." She believes that our progress has stalled and that, most importantly, "attitudes have taken a giant leap backwards."

Many of the 'numbers' do not show substantial progress. "According to the American Bar Association, women in 2008 made up almost half of all associates, but only 18.3 percent of partners. Only 15 women run Fortune 500 companies." But, according to Lipman, attitudes are where the major problems for women lie. For example, "women these days are portrayed as either witches or bimbos, with pretty much no alternative in between."

Lipman concludes with a truly resonating point: women have become focused on the numbers, when we really need to turn our attention to changing attitudes and making sure that "respect is part of the equation."

To read the complete article click here.

Fighting for Gender Equity through Employment Discrimination Litigation

Ms. JD — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:23:29 -0500

[Ed. Note: Ms. JD is pleased to host this content by Michael Siegel. Michael Siegel is a recent law school grad and incoming associate at Siegel & Yee in Oakland, California. He hopes to be an ally of Ms. JD and righteous women everywhere.]

By Michael Siegel

“Young women attorneys should not be afraid to brave new areas of expertise and find creative ways to defend women, especially women of color, from all the misogynous ways that they are humiliated and discriminated against on a daily basis."—Anne Weills, Civil Rights Attorney, Oakland, CA

I am lucky to be a child of the women’s liberation movement. My mother, Anne Weills, has been a politically active radical feminist and anti-imperialist since the latter days of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Her political maturation occurred during the Civil Rights, Anti-War, and Women’s Liberation Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and to this day she remains engaged in work to empower women, people of color, workers, and other subjects of oppression and discrimination.

Anne is also an attorney, and I am working with her at a small civil rights firm in Oakland, California. Although the attorneys here do a lot of work on issues ranging from labor union organizing to Alien Tort Claims Act actions for atrocities committed abroad, the main niche that we have carved out for ourselves is in the realm of employment discrimination. And, more specifically, we have had a lot of success representing women who have been subject to discrimination, harassment, and retaliation while working at public and private universities.

This specialized practice began with a female mathematics professor at the University of California, Jenny Harrison.

Conservative Radio Show Host Liddy on Sotomayor: "Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating..."

Kat — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:22:30 -0500

Conservative radio show host G. Gordon Liddy made a series of inflammatory comments regarding Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the bench earlier this week. He initially criticized her for making "racist comments" and then moved on to denigrating her gender, stating: "Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

Liddy then rejected the idea of the importance of diversity on the Supreme Court: "And everybody is cheering because Hispanics and females have been, quote, underrepresented, unquote. ...[T]he Supreme Court is not designed to be and should not be a representative body."

Book Review: Pioneering Women Lawyers

jessie — Mon, 25 May 2009 13:48:48 -0500

A choice excerpt from Pioneering Women Lawyers: From Kate Stoneman to the Present:

... I had the occaison to look at my personnel file and there was my resumé, complete with several notes stapled to it. I couldn't stand it - I had to look at what someone thought was important enough to attach to my resume when I was interviewed. One attachment was a copy of a newspaper article about a large international law firm in New York City being sued fr "sex discrimination" (this was even before "gender" was the politically correct term). The other was a handwritten note from the associate that reviewed resumés for the firm's recruiting partner (and a former law school classmate). The note said, "If we have to hire a woman, let's hire this one."

Nominate a Woman to the Supreme Court

Eralon — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:14:28 -0500

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the Women's Power Summit on Law and Leadership at the University of Texas. One of the most exciting experiences while attending was hearing firsthand from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the struggles she's faced as a woman in the legal profession. One of the things Justice O'Connor discussed was her disappointment that there was not more of a movement to replace her on the Court with a woman. That very same night, the news of Justice Souter's retirement was announced. As noted in Jessie's earlier post about the summit, a resolution was passed urging President Obama to appoint a woman to replace Justice Souter on the Court.

To me, wanting another woman on the Court seems totally self explanatory. Which is why I was shocked when I turned on the radio last night and Mark Levin was on discussing the Supreme Court and said something along the lines of "who cares about genitalia- it's what's between the ears, not between the legs that matters." And of course, this was not about supporting women because they are equals- it was basically an argument that gender shouldn't be considered because it makes no diffrerence in how cases are decided. And I thought to myself, seriously, why doesn't he get it?

Legalized Rape? Opponents Speak Out About New Afghan Law

stacisaurus — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:23:27 -0500

Over much protest, last week Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed into law a bill codifying existing Islamic law which creates significant restrictions upon the times that women can leave their homes in Afghanistan. In addition, the law also requires that women meet the sexual needs of their husbands, stating in relevant part that "unless the wife is ill, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband.” It is believed that this new law will lead not only to decreased education and employment opportunities for women (because, under the tenets of the law, a woman may only leave her home for "a legitimate purpose"), but also to what can essentially be recognized as legalized marital rape. President Obama recently commented on the new law at the NATO Summit in Strasbourg, France, noting

“I think this law is abhorrent. Certainly the views of the administration have been, and will be, communicated to the Karzai government. And we think that it is very important for us to be sensitive to local culture, but we also think that there are certain basic principles that all nations should uphold, and respect for women and respect for their freedom and integrity is an important principle.”