In this paper, I wanted to focus on a previously discussed theme in class, women in the legal profession. More specifically, I was focused on women’s experiences in areas like law school and the law firms, and how these two institutions impact the role of gender within the professional partner track. I want to look at whether this disparity in the legal profession is just a reflection of society’s views on gender or if this disparity is caused by the structure of law school classes or law firms and what could aide this inequality. This area of the legal profession interests me because as female student with an interest in becoming a lawyer it is important to address and fix the strong gender inequality within the legal profession. In order …show more content…
With the help of my employer, I was able to get in contact with a highly recommended female partner, Lawyer X, from a women owned family law firm in the Los Angeles area, who has been working in the legal profession for over twenty years. Lawyer X is a white, 52 year old female partner who knew she wanted to be a lawyer, but unfortunately failed out of college originally and had limited options for law schools. Lawyer X persevered was able to graduate from Whittier Law School with honors and no major specialization in law and went on to work at a big law firm and then another firm before she ended up at the small family law firm, Meyer, Olson, Lowy & Meyers, she is at currently. While Meyer, Olson, Lowy & Meyers is a small firm, they are one of the biggest firms focused on family law. Within this law firm, they hire a diverse crowd of mostly …show more content…
show us that women are significantly underrepresented of females in the partnership and ownership of the legal profession. The trend of women owned law firms will hopefully aid the disproportion of the genders within the legal profession. While the number of women owned law firms is growing, as established by The New Yorker’s article, there still are not enough yet to overcome this disparity. These female owned law firms are still a start to end this disparity and Lawyer X claims that “not only is it important for women to be represented in just the legal profession, it is important for them to be represented in its partnership and ownership roles” and hopes that these women owned law firms became a trend to fill this need. As established by Lawyer X, this gender disparity is a well known fact within the profession, both to those who are victims of this gender discrimination and those who inflict it but little is done by the legal profession to address it and fix it. While the numbers of women enrolled in law school have increased, men have historically and continue to still outnumber women practicing law. While most women end up going to ? law schools, in Lawyer X’s example we cannot attribute her law school decision on rankings or gender. Lawyer X had a unique law school experience, in which she was only accepted to Whittier Law School within California because while receiving her undergraduate degree, she failed out of college and begged Northwestern
Blatantly sexist laws and practices are slowly being eliminated while social perceptions of "women's roles" continue to stagnate and even degrade back to traditional ideals. It is these social perceptions that challenge the evolution of women as equal on all levels. In this study, I will argue that subtle and blatant sexism continues to exist throughout educational, economic, professional and legal arenas.
In the article “Sex Segregation at Work: Persistence and Change” by Anastasia Prokos explores ideas around the challenges and reasons of sex segregation in the work place. She argues that even though the United States has made several steps in the right direction throughout our history, there is still “… women and men in the contemporary United States continue to be concentrated in different occupations, jobs, and industries” (Prokos 564). She is presenting this as a social problem that leads to stereotypes, discrimination, and unequal pay.
The 'Standard'. Equal: Women Reshape American Law. Norton. I am a naysayer. ISBN 0393065553.
The tragedies Ruth Ginsburg experienced throughout her upbringing had a lasting contribution to her life today. In 1933, she was born to Russian-Jewish immigrants amidst the Great Depression. In the hardships of the Great Depression, she lost both her older sister and mother as a child. This time was one of great difficulty for Ginsburg; however, she withstood this adversity and gained invaluable life lessons giving her the opportunity to attain unprecedented levels of success. After coping with her losses, she left to attend Harvard Law School and later Columbia Law School, two world-renowned schools of law. At this period in history, however, both men who dominated this field and who ran the schools discriminated Ginsburg based on her gender (“Ruth Bader Ginsburg”). At one point during the school day, the Dean of Harvard Law approached her and said, “How do you justify taking a spot from a qualified man?” (Galanes). Despite this prejudice, Ginsburg continued to excel in her schooling where she later graduated as top of her class at Columbia (“Ruth Bader Ginsburg”).
Many have argued that there is obvious disparate treatment among particular demographic groups of criminal defendants by the courts. While the federal sentencing guidelines were created in order to maintain uniform treatment of defendants based on legally relevant factors, we still see extralegal factors causing disparity. A significant amount of attention, however, has been focused on racial disparities in sentencing. While racial disparity is an important concern, there is another disparity with which attention is needed: sex-based disparity. Sex-based disparity, or, gender disparity, while it does receive significantly less media attention, is just as great if not greater than racial disparity. Similar to race, gender is considered an extralegal
In “The Great Lawsuit”, Margaret Fuller tries to stop the great inequalities between men and women by describing great marriages where the husband and wife are equal, by stating how society constricts the women’s true inner genius, and by recording admirable women who stand up in an effort for equality. In her article, Fuller explains how the current society constricts women’s rights in an effort to show the inequalities between the men and women. For instance, she feels that “such woman as these, rich in genius, of most tender sympathies, and capable of high virtue, and a chastened harmony, ought not find themselves in a place so narrow” (Fuller 741). Margaret Fuller explains that all women, even those with “rich genius,” find themselves at a disadvantage because of the society’s inequality. She also feels that the women are just as “capable of high virtue” as the men, and do not deserve to be in “a place so narrow.”
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.
Historically, criminology was significantly ‘gender-blind’ with men constituting the majority of criminal offenders, criminal justice practitioners and criminologists to understand ‘male crimes’ (Carraine, Cox, South, Fussey, Turton, Theil & Hobbs, 2012). Consequently, women’s criminality was a greatly neglected area and women were typically seen as non-criminal. Although when women did commit crimes they were medicalised and pathologised, and sent to mental institutions not prisons (Carraine et al., 2012). Although women today are treated differently to how they were in the past, women still do get treated differently in the criminal justice system. Drawing upon social control theory, this essay argues that nature and extent of discrimination
Women’s equality has made huge advancements in the United States in the past decade. One of the most influential persons to the movement has been a woman named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ruth faced gender discrimination many times throughout her career and worked hard to ensure that discrimination based on a person’s gender would be eliminated for future generations. Ginsburg not only worked to fight for women’s equality but fought for the rights of men, as well, in order to show that equality was a human right’s issue and not just a problem that women faced. Though she faced hardships and discrimination, Ruth never stopped working and thanks to her equality is a much closer reality than it was fifty years ago. When Ruth first started her journey in law, women were practically unheard of as lawyers; now three women sit on the bench of the highest court in the nation.
Paula England, the author of “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled,” sheds light on how the gender system has progressively become unbalanced. England 's main focus for this article is to provide the reader with an understanding of how women 's drive to change hasn 't just affected their labor, but men 's labor as well. She states “Since 1970, women increasingly majored in previously male-dominated, business-related fields, such as business, marketing, and accounting; while fewer chose traditionally female majors like English, education, and sociology; and there was little increase of men’s choice of these latter majors” (England and Li, 2006, 667-69). This quote supports the fact that women have been branching out in the workplace, however
law firms for years. "The Battle of the Sexes" as it is called; the everlasting
The issue of gender inequality will never truly be solved in the United States. This arises from differences in socially constructed gender roles as well as biologically through hormonal differences, chromosomes, and brain structures. Gender inequality is defined as unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals based on gender. One of the reasons for gender inequality is income disparities. Another reason is because of the positions in the workplace. Thirdly, the reason is because of beliefs that one another has. For these reasons is why these situations should be examined to get to the root of the problem.
Over the years there have been many changes in the work-place. Since the second World War there has been a steady increase of women on the workforce across all the different types of careers there are in the United States. Some careers have seen more of a rapid change than others, a few of the career fields that have not really had much growth in gender diversity have been Engineering and Technology. Both of these fields have always been more male dominate throughout the history of their existence. The problem is that both of these careers demand a constant stream of new innovative ideas to fuel advancements in different types of technology. Those advancements are also very important to the public’s day to day life, as both of these fields are all around us every day. There is no better way to get new ideas than to bring in someone who has a different thought process than you. That is why colleges and companies need to try harder to bring in women to these careers rather than overlook them. With that being said if someone is not right for the job, then they’re not right for the job, the problem is that many companies are choosing male engineers over female engineers. If the careers in these to field want to keep having great advancement, they’re going to need all the great minds that we can get, and stop turning so many away. There has been a lot of research done over this same subject over several years but the results do not seem to be changing, and again and again they always seem to so that men are favored over women when it comes to getting a job in the engineering and technology fields. The problem all boils down to the companies and colleges, both of which need to change so those who desire to excel in these fields, get ...
Catherine Mackinnon’s radical feminism theory argues that societally is patriarchally dominated by males (MacKinnon 16). The legal system therefore has an inherent male bias. As seen in Susan Glaspell’s short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” the male-dominated jury would not have acknowledged the psychological trauma of Mrs. Wright’s situation. The facts of the case would have proven her guilt, but the male-dominated legal system would not have accounted for the experiences of Mrs. Wright. As domestic women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters were able to identity with Mrs. Wright and understand her
ii Margaret Thornton, "Women as fringe dwellers of the jurisprudential community", in Sex, Power and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 190.