The legal workplace is a high demand job that requires a lot of sacrifices to achieve success. Attorneys at law work over the standard forty hours per week, and have to sacrifices many parts of their social life for their jobs. Women in law find work even more stressful and difficult to balance with home life because attorneys have high demand jobs. Women attorneys have to find a balance between the demands of practicing law and the demands of their traditional gender roles on the homestead. The legal workplace is unfortunately victim to discrimination, whether discrimination is quid pro quo, hostile work environment, or wrongful termination. However, the legal workplace is changing and adapting to a more gender-neutral workplace environment. Discrimination is taken more seriously, especially since women are in a protected class under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Young women, adolescents and children, are being encouraged from a young age to strive for success in the same frame of mind as men. In other words, young women are not being as encouraged to be housewives. Independence is strongly encouraged. Finally, legal workplaces are redesigning their organizations to better accommodate for female specific needs, such as maternity leave. The legal workplace is evolving into an equal playing field between genders by raising awareness about discrimination, encouraging young women, and implementing policies that support female specific needs.
Women in the legal workplace suffered discrimination for many years because of the preconception that law is men’s work. In recent years, discrimination has received more attention. Discrimination in the workplace is now a hot topic in employment law and policy making. Employers ar...
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... July 11, 2010. http://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/news/firms-increase-parental-leave (accessed March 15, 2012).
First New York City Bar, "Parental Leave Policies and Practices for Attorneys: Committee On Women In the Profession," The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, no. August (2007): 8-21,
First New York City Bar, "Parental Leave Policies and Practices for Attorneys: Committee On Women In the Profession," The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, no. August (2007): 8-21,
Judith S. Kaye, "Women Lawyers in Big Firms: A Study in Progress Toward Gender Equality," Fordham Law Review, 57, no. 1 (1988): 111-126,
Carolyn McAllaster, and Jennifer Brobst, "The North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys: Creating Camaraderie, Nurturing Leaders, and Protecting the Rights of Women," The North Carolina State Bar Journal, no. Fall (2011): 15,
As cited in Padavic and Reskin’s article Women and Men at Work, discrimination against women in the workplace was a serious issue. They suffered as a result of inferior titles, wages and respect. This “glass ceiling” made it extremely hard for woman to break into higher offices in government organizations, yet O’Conner remained persistent. She finally found a position as a deputy county attorney and began to thrive in the legal field; even landing a seat on the Arizona State Senate where she became the first woman to serve as the state’s Majority Leader. In 1979, she worked on Arizona’s Court of Appeals until she was ultimately appointed to the Supreme Court in 1981.
If you and your significant other had a child, would you want to be there to not only support your partner, but to see your child’s first milestones in real life? Of course you would! The problem is most parents miss crucial parts of their child’s life because of the lack of paid maternity and paternity leave in the United States. New families, across the nation, should be allowed a minimum six months of paid maternity leave.
Despite legislation for equal opportunities, sexism is still evident in the workplace. Women have made great advancements in the workforce and have become an integral part of the labor market. They have greater access to higher education and as a result, greater access to traditionally male dominated professions such as law. While statistics show that women are equal to men in terms of their numbers in the law profession, it is clear however, that they have not yet achieved equality in all other areas of their employment. Discrimination in the form of gender, sex and sexual harassment continues to be a problem in today’s society.
While the median weekly pay for women rose in the past decades, it is still largely inferior to the median weekly pay of men employed in the same jobs. This difference of pay also puts an additional burden on women who are expected to stay home when emergencies arise. They cannot in some cases pay for daycare or rely on their companies’ understanding that someone has to take care of the family obligations. In result, they are penalized when comes the time to find candidates for promotion and are seen as not as dependable as their male counterparts. Finally, women face a social bias against them that encompass gender, appearance and race. It effectively punishes them for reasons that are out of their own control and not related to their job performance and skills. Laws against gender-based discrimination, more flexible workplace arrangements and a change in our culture regarding women may help fight discrimination and help women reach their full potential in the workforce. By starting to allow for more flexibility, paying women on a comparable scale than the one used for men, and support women in their desire to take care of their families, corporations could set the tone for a fairer treatment of women in the
The once male dominated, corporate, "white collar" America has seen a phenomenal influx of women within the last thirty years. Although a female lawyer, physician, or CEO is no longer considered a rarity in our times, women still face quite a deal of oppression in comparison to their male counterparts. In retrospect, some professions have always been controlled by women, and men have not made a noticeable advance in these fields. In 1970, finding a female lawyer to represent you would be a difficult task, since less than five percent of the profession were women. Today, that number has risen to almost thirty percent. The percentage of female doctors has almost tripled in the course of thirty years. African Americans have not made such a conspicuous progression within the last fifty years, while women have made a tremendous impact on the corporate world. One may wonder, how did women make these extraordinary advances? For the most part, it is due to the education they receive. At the present time young girls are encouraged to enroll in classes dealing with math and science, rather than home economics and typing. As pointed out by Nanette Asimov, in her essay "Fewer Teen Girls Enrolling in Technology Classes", school officials are advocating the necessity of advanced placement, and honor classes for teenage girls, in both the arts and sciences. This support and reassurance than carries over onto college, and finds a permanent fixture in a woman’s life. While women are continuing their success in once exclusively male oriented professions, they are still lacking the respect and equality from their peers, coworkers, and society. The average male lawyer, and doctor make twenty-five percent more money than their female equivalent. Women have always lived with the reputation of being intellectually inferior to, and physically submissive to men. This medieval, ignorant notion is far fetched from the truth. In 1999, high school men and women posted similar SAT scores, being separated by a only a few points. In addition to posting similar scores on the SAT, the average males score was a mere two-tenths of a point higher than an average females score on the ACT. Even though a woman maybe as qualified as a male for a certain occupation , women receive unwanted harassment, and are under strict scrutiny. A good illustration of this would be the women represented in "Two Women Cadets Leave the Citadel.
Gregory, Raymond F. Women and Workplace Discrimination: Overcoming Barriers to Gender Equality. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Gender inequality in the workforce is not only a current civil rights issue but one that spans back through our history as a nation. Rooted as far back as the 1800s when the Cult of Domesticity
For a long time traditional liberal legal theory has struggled to win gender equality through the courts, but has not made the necessary gains. This theory advises women to change their relationship to the male power structure, and offers two ways in which women can do this to attain equity: the “sameness” approach and the “difference” approach. The first approach, “sameness,” suggests that women should stress male-female similarities. Traditional theory justifies this approach by saying, “to the extent that women are no different from men they deserve what (men) have” (33). Traditional theory advises women who feel different to from men use the second approach, and stress t...
Schipani, C. (2013). Class Action Litigation After Dukes: In Search of a Remedy for Gender Discrimination in Employment. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 46(4), 1249-1277.
Recently women’s rights and women’s equality in the workplace has come back to the fore as a topic for discussion in government agencies and the United Nations. Whilst this is a very important topic, when it comes to time off from work when a new child is born, women in the US have some provision, whereas men have none.
Women are more than half the work force and are graduating at higher rates then men and continue to earn considerably less then men. There are several contributing factors to the gender wage gap. Women experience gender discrimination in the work force even though it’s been illegal since the Equal Pay Act in 1963. One of the challenges for women is uncovering discrimination. There is a lack of transparency in earnings because employees are either contractually prohibited or it’s strongly discouraged from being discussed. Discrimination also occurs in the restricting of women’s access to jobs with the highest commission payments, or access to lucrative clients.
Ernst, Julia L. "The Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues: An Inside Perspective on Lawmaking by and for Women." Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, 12.2 (2006): 189-274.
The institutionalized discrimination of women in the work place is nothing new or unheard of. The brunt of it has happened fairly recently as women began to enter the labor market in force less than a century ago. The affect of this discrimination has had long lasting, generation spanning affects, but as time has passed and feminism spread, the gender-gap has slowly begun to shrink.
Leonard, Jonathan S. (1989) Women and Affirmative Action The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 3, No. 1, 61-75.
Kelly, Jon. "The Politics of Paternity Leave." BBC News. BBC, 26 Aug. 2010. Web. 01 Apr. 2014.