“Change, continuity and crisis in the legal profession: the role of gender”

This essay suggests that recent work in feminist theory should reorient the questions that are asked about the role of gender in the legal profession. Some use gender as a category of analysis to explore differences that reinforce conventional gendered stereotypes, such as the conceptualization of work and family in lawyering as a “women's issue.” Others use conventional sociology of the professions analysis, such as stratification, to measure women's “success” and “satisfaction” in the context of the traditional law firm. By focusing on some recent historical and sociological research on women in the legal and medical professions, the author illustrates how we might ask different questions, not to reify gender differences but to more fully examine the role that gender difference, as socially constructed, might play in the transformation of law practice.

Reviewed by: A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community Patricia Richard (bio) A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community. By Nicole Etcheson. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2011. Pp. x, 371. $39.95 cloth) The book under review considers the impact of the Civil War on the home front and in particular on Putnam County, Indiana. Examining the war from a communal perspective has deep roots in Civil War scholarship and one of the most famous of these studies was done by Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (2003). Ayers compared two counties: one in Pennsylvania and one in Virginia. Mathew Gallman and Phillip Paludan provided more general studies of the northern home front in The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (1994) and “A People’s Contest”: The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865 (1996), respectively. Nicole Etcheson continues a home-front focus with a microhistory of Putnam County in which she considers class, gender, and race as influenced by the national events before, during, and after the war. A Generation at War is a multifaceted study that builds on Civil War political and social history by expanding the examination to include [End Page 211] the prewar and postwar periods to gain, as she puts it, “a better sense of the changes the war brought” to this rural Indiana county and “contrast the urban focus of previous Northern home-front studies” (p.12). Divided into three logical parts consisting of prewar (beginning in 1850), the war, and postwar (beyond 1877), she then divides each section into men’s sphere and politics, women’s sphere and their dependence on men, and the issue of race in Putnam County. She ties each section together by following the lives of local citizens throughout this period. She argues that all Americans were influenced by the issue of slavery and race whether they were intimately involved in or opposed to abolition or not. Basing her conclusions on an impressive array of town, county, state, and national records, newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and memoirs, she provides a complex look at Putnam County and how it fits into this tumultuous period. It is the scope of this study that gives it weight. By examining both prewar and postwar history, Etcheson is able to show the lasting impact of the conflict. Among many of her important points, she reminds us that northern states had complex ideas about race and war goals. Antebellum Indiana, for instance, had pervasive racism represented in antiblack laws that forbade the migration of blacks into the state and provided few civil protections for black residents. In spite of the small black community of Putnam though, after the war prominent African American residents encouraged North Carolina blacks to migrate to Indiana. The partisan politics that split over race issues before the war and resorted to violence continued after the war by attacking these newcomers who challenged white supremacy. Likewise, she cleverly uses pension benefits to consider gender and race. While pensions bolstered veterans as the breadwinners of their families, in an ironic twist they also gave soldiers’ widows an independence that they had never enjoyed while their husbands were alive. Furthermore, pensions allowed black veterans to enjoy the benefits and thus were a “radical break with white supremacy” (p. 212). [End Page 212] Overall, this work is well suited to undergraduate study. It could be used to discuss the impact of national political issues on local politics, Indiana history as part and parcel of the war effort, gender roles and race relations, the issues of divided citizenry and the Copperheads, and more. Etcheson’s scope of the 1850s to the 1880s provides scholars with a broad look at the impact of the war that is rarely seen on such an intimate level. This work has much to offer both student and Civil War scholar. Patricia Richard Patricia Richard is associate professor of history at Metropolitan State College of Denver in Denver, Colorado, and author of Busy Hands: Images of the Family in the Northern Civil War Effort (2003). Copyright © 2012 Kentucky...

African Americans remain proportionally under-represented in the legal profession. According to an ABA report at the beginning of the millennium, only 3.9 percent of the U.S. bar is African American, while almost 13 percent of the U.S. population is black. This underrepresentation exists despite the use of race conscious affirmative action admission policies at most law schools. Given the recent threats to affirmative action, it is necessary for legal educators to shift the methods of achieving racial diversity and proportional minority representation in the legal profession to academically situated interventions. Two problems however are associated with such efforts. First, projects tend to be launched in atheoretical ways. Second, when the discourse in which initiatives are embedded is examined, it is found to derive from discourses of deficiency or rejection. These discourses fault the culture of underrepresented minorities rather than questioning the role of power, privilege and institutional racism in students’ lack of preparation. Our project addresses both of these problems. First, in looking at attorneys who successfully navigated the pipeline, the study is conceptualized within a discourse of achievement. We conducted both one-on-one interviews and focus groups with approximately 50 lawyers who met the following criteria: 1) graduated from a US law school between 2000 and 2007; 2) were admitted to the bar in a US jurisdiction; 3) self-identify as African American; 4) are working in some area of law; 5) traveled a “precarious” pipeline to the legal profession. All sessions lasted one hour and were recorded, transcribed and analyzed. Although the stories gleaned from participants depict a range of contexts and experiences, common patterns emerged related to how the pipeline was entered and navigated. The overarching phenomenon was labeled as “working recognition.” This concept describes both the recognition experienced in various forms by participants and the recognition they transformed into strategic activities aimed at overcoming academic, economic, social and/or political obstacles encountered in the pipeline. It was through such activity that our participants ultimately attained recognition as members of the legal profession. Our interpretations reveal a model of early, connected and continuous interventions that would include components that address motivation, skill development, and professional and racial identity issues.

SUMMARY South Africa lags behind with regard to an effective framework supporting substantive equality in the legal profession. The structure of the legal profession and the number of women represented in the legal profession do not as yet reflect the diversity of South African society. A number of factors play a role in the skewed representation of female attorneys and advocates in the legal profession. In addition, formal equality cannot translate into gender transformation, as the issues that cause such inequalities extend beyond the scope of attaining sameness. International instruments suggest that special measures be adopted to achieve substantive equality specifically with regard to the role of women in the workplace. This article analyses the current composition of the legal profession from the perspective of gender and race, while promoting the concept of substantive equality as a preferred approach to gender transformation in the legal profession. It considers the theoretical framework for gender equality as a human right in South Africa by examining relevant legislation and international and regional instruments, and analysing the extent to which the Cape Bar maternity policy, as an existing transformation initiative, implemented on the basis of a gender stereotype, encourages substantive gender transformation in the legal profession. Key words: gender equality; human rights; legal profession; substantive equality; formal equality; gender transformation; gender stereotypes

Notwithstanding the presence of three women on the United States Supreme Court, in terms of gender equality, surprisingly little has changed in the legal profession over the past twenty years. This stagnation is particularly apparent in the highest paying and most prestigious sectors, such as the Supreme Court bar, the top echelons of the top law firms, the judiciary, and the general-counsel’s office. Even where objective facts suggest that female lawyers should be hired, billed out, or compensated at the same or higher rate than their male peers, subjective decisions informed, in part, by bias and stereotype drive a different result. This Article proposes that, until we stop indoctrinating law students that a “good lawyer” looks, sounds, and presents like the Classical warrior — that is, a male — these barriers will persist. For many law students, the first place they get to model what it means to look, sound, and act like a lawyer is in moot court or other oral-argument exercises. Especially in light of an overall law-school culture that reinforces the significance of inborn abilities, it is not hard to see how moot court’s frequent emphasis on “natural” oral-advocacy talent, and its implicit connection of that talent to traits traditionally associated with men, can influence how students — and later lawyers — develop rigid conceptions of what a good lawyer looks, sounds, and acts like. And continuing to uncritically teach the values of Classical rhetoric — values inherited from a culture that silenced women’s voices in the public sphere — exacerbates the problem. This Article explores the dynamics and consequences of reinforcing the male paradigm in the way we coach and judge moot court and other oral-advocacy exercises, highlights some barriers to change, and proposes concrete steps legal educators, practitioners, and judges can take to help change what the voice of authority sounds like in the legal profession.

Value polarization is one of the key factors in societal development. This research focuses on whether opinions concerning gender roles in the domestic and public spheres are polarized in European societies, a topic still under-investigated. Based on the fifth wave of European Values Study data (2017–2020), the study shows that gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere are more polarized than those in the public sphere. Polarization by education, level of income, migration background, and degree of religiosity is stronger for gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere, whereas polarization by gender is stronger for gender role attitudes in the public sphere. Both gender role attitudes in the public and domestic spheres are most strongly polarized by education. At the same time, belonging to a social group with higher education, higher income, and lower religiosity can promote more progressive views towards gender roles. Opinions in Eastern European countries tend to seem more polarized than in Western European countries, even if with some exceptions. In countries with a higher level of gender equality, the level of polarization is a bit lower, while in countries where there is a remarkable rise of anti-gender narratives, opponent and conflictual views are higher.

What gender are you? And in virtue of what? These are questions of gender categorization. Such questions are increasingly at the core of many contemporary debates about gender, both within philosophy and in public discourse. Growing efforts are being made to highlight the importance of gender identity to gender categorization. Philosophical theories of gender have traditionally focused on gender role—the social norms, obligations, and positions that others impose on you based on perceived gender. But the experiences of trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people have shown that an exclusive focus on gender role is inadequate for theorizing gender. We also need to consider a person’s relationship to gender categories and gender norms. Two people might both be perceived by others as women, but while one thinks of herself as a woman the other thinks of themself as genderqueer. And this difference in gender self-identification is not merely a difference in personal feeling. A gender nonconforming woman and a genderqueer person—even if they are treated similarly by others—will often experience and navigate gender norms and roles quite differently, and this difference matters to a full understanding of gender.

ABSTRACTPolitical rule depends upon public discourse as it requires negotiation and compromise of conflicting interests. Public discourse includes activities that can be described as cause lawyering, lobbying, and rule entrepreneurship. The rule of law supports public discourse through, inter alia, the right to petition. The right to petition requires identification of those engaged in public discourse through petition. This requirement reflects a principle of general application. Solicitors owe an ethical duty to support the rule of law, including the right to petition. Lawyers without a specific duty to uphold the rule of law have ethical duties to maintain the reputation of the legal system and their legal profession. Lawyers, including solicitors, are frequent contributors to public discourse. Lawyers sometimes resist identifying the clients or client groups they represent in public discourse on the ground of the need to protect client confidentiality. This resistance is not ethically well reasoned, and lawyers should recognise a duty to disclose the identity of a client or client group for whom the lawyer is making representations in any public arena, understanding public arena to include both representations to public office holders (lobbying) and contributions to reform campaigns or consultations (cause lawyering or rule entrepreneurship).

The present work is part of the research project “Legal professions: impact of gender relations, family roles and care in the strategies of professional integration of lawyers in Santa Rosa”, whose purpose is to make an approximation of the positions that the women lawyers of Santa Rosa (La Pampa) occupy, in the professional work areas of the legal field, and observe how gender and family roles and care responsibilities affect their professional career. It will reflect on the relationship between the training of legal operators in higher education (HE), their professional practices and the re/production of gender stereotypes, since there is still a general collective imaginary that preserves the traditional model of femininity, by which differentiated conceptions of the characteristics and capacities of women and men are imposed on subjectivities. This imaginary acts in the lives of women inside and outside the universities in the form of discrimination, and the subjectivities constructed under these gender differential patterns are what ultimately shape the professional practice of law. The legal profession is conquered by stereotypes and differential gender relations that harm women, and despite the fact that the field of legal university study has been feminized, as well as public and private professional practice, there are still inequalities in the ways in which the legal profession is exercised by men and women. Therefore, it becomes necessary to make a critical theoretical reflection of the process of labor insertion of women lawyers and the relationship between profession, gender, family relations and care of the city of Santa Rosa, this work responding to the dual purpose of evidencing, while promoting the denaturation of gender segregation and inequalities against women.

The research presented here is in investigation into women's occupational choice with specific reference to women in male-dominated occupations. Three main research areas are reviewed and evaluated: theories of occupational choice in general; theories of women's occupational choice; and theories pertaining to women's choice of and experiences in male-dominated occupations. An exploratory study was carried out into the gender-dominant occupational preferences of female and male students, using the theoretical framework of Bandura's self-efficacy theory. The main finding of this Study was that self-efficacy expectations do not play a large part in explaining women's and men’s preference for gender-typical occupations and reluctance to consider gender-atypical occupations. The main study takes a more global approach and investigates a large number of possible psychological and social determinants of women's occupational choice and entry into male-dominated occupations. The subjects in this piece of research were women employed in three types of male-dominated occupation : manual, non-manual; and transitional (occupations that are changing from male-domination to gender-neutrality). A group of women in non-manual female-dominated occupations was also included as a control group. The subjects participated in individual, semi-structured interviews and completed three questionnaires. The resulting data was subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Many diverse elements were found to influence women’s occupational choice. Differences between women in different types of male-dominated occupation, In the antecedents to their entry into a male-dominated job and in then- experiences at work, are discussed. A model representing women's occupational choice, with particular reference to women in male-dominated occupations, is proposed. Next the factors determining women's experiences in male-dominated areas of work are delineated. Finally suggestions for future research are put forward, and conclusions are drawn.

In the 1990s Brazil and other emerging economies went through a major transformation. Closed economies were opened, foreign investment encouraged, and many state-owned enterprises privatized. This “global transformation” had a major impact on the Brazilian legal system. While many parts of the legal system were affected, the corporate law profession changed the most. This sector includes all the institutions and actors that provide legal advice to corporations whether domestic and foreign, public or private. Global transformation brought about major changes in the national political economy, led to a flood of new laws governing corporate activity, and created a demand for new kinds of legal services to help companies manage the new legal environment. This led to rapid growth of the complex of institutions that provide corporate legal services and affected the way lawyering was practiced and organized. Many forces came together to give new shape to the professional identity of lawyers, the structures they work in, and the roles they play. The result was the creation of a new and powerful segment of the legal profession whose activities had profound impacts on the rest of the profession, the legal system, the operation of enterprises (both public and private), state policy and global governance. In this book, we describe the growth of the corporate legal sector in Brazil, and the impact of this development on law-making, legal education, regulation of the legal profession, public interest law, trade policy, and gender roles. The book is part of a larger study of global transformation and its impact on the legal profession carried out by GLEE, the project on Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies. Based at the Harvard Law School’s Center for the Legal Profession, GLEE is currently studying these developments in Brazil, India and China, with plans to expand the project into Africa and the states of the former Soviet Union. In Brazil, GLEE’s research has been based at the law school of the Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV) in Sao Paulo.

The relationship between gender role attitudes and fertility intentions is highly debated among social scientists. We emphasize the need for a multi-dimensional theoretical and empirical approach extending the two-step behavioral gender revolution approach towards a three-step attitudinal gender revolution approach. Making use of the Generations and Gender Survey of eight European countries we demonstrate the usefulness of such an approach. First, gender roles concern different areas of life requiring that we distinguish between three essential dimensions of gender roles: gender roles in the public sphere, mothers’ role in the family, and fathers’ role in the family. We show that attitudes towards gender roles in the public sphere and mothers’ role in the family create more variation in fertility intentions than attitudes towards fathers’ role in the family. Second, gender equality affects women’s and men’s lives differently and our results show that gender role attitudes create more variation in women’s fertility intentions than in men’s intentions. Last, people’s expectations about gender roles and family life vary across context. In the Western European countries we find examples of a negative association between egalitarian gender role attitudes and fertility intentions, while in the Eastern European countries we find examples of a positive relationship.

The image of Lady Justice, a white woman, sometimes appearing with her eyes veiled and other times unveiled, at times bearing scales and/or a sword in her hands, still is a common and popular feature of legal culture in many parts of the world. This is an image of justice that is found everywhere, from courthouses to cartoons. However, one may ask: “Who is this woman?”; Is she really a worthy representative of justice?; Or even a commendable representative of women? Thus, in this article, it is proposed to question the image of Lady Justice and the interpretations that have been associated with it, as well as the standards of conduct required of, and imposed upon, women both inside and outside the legal profession. The article will consider a range of arguments related to such questions, particularly on the issues of gender and race, by using two female characters: Eowyn (from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) and Niobe (from the Wachowskis’s The Matrix). The two characters are women who have some significance in both plots. Through them, I will establish some similarities and differences with Justitia, namely the need to be disguised as men or embrace male attitudes (a similar process concerning women in the legal profession, for example); the use of weapons (specifically, the sword, and, hence, the necessary analysis of women as law breakers, in contradiction to the image of Justitia); and finally some key issues relating to the representation of women of colour.

Inevitably, any theory of communication addresses the contexts of its times. The public sphere essay was written in 1982. Then, the world was on the edge of a Reagan-Thatcher revolution that would loose neo-liberalism and begin to dismantle the welfare state. The United States was enduring a deep recession due to efforts to control inflation brought about by the debt-financed Vietnam war and careless energy policies. The Cold War held sway. Apocalyptic rhetoric from the Oval Office called for new, computer-guided smart weapons. The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment fingered, as did issues of race and class left unaddressed by the Great Society. Mass media ruled the airwaves. Television and newspaper companies converged. Stylized political news turned sampling data into horse race thrills ramped up with sexy sound bites. Matters did call for national debate. However, little meaningful public discussion ensued. The linguistic turn, postmodernity, culture wars, migration, AIDS, globalization, and the explosion of digital media--all elements of a coming communication revolution--were readying in the wings. This essay revisits the beginnings of studies in the public sphere, initiated among these circumstances, as critical communication inquiry. Such inquiry identifies communication as symbolic interaction and offers contextual approaches to questions of language, society, and social change (Littlejohn, 1983, pp. 45-73). The essay proceeds to compare Jurgen Habermas's neo-Kantian euro-centric declinist thesis against the notion of pluralistic argument spheres. A brief discussion of the prospects of 21st century studies of the public, technical, and personal spheres of argument is offered in conclusion. ARGUMENT SPHERES AND SOCIAL CONTEXTS My experiences with debate, graduate studies, and communication research had led me to believe that argumentation always, though unevenly, has fueled American democratic practices. Wil Linkugel introduced me to the study of public address at the University of Kansas through his ground-breaking courses in African-American rhetoric and in women's movements. In the discipline I knew, the key moments in the formation of publics featured insurgency, opposition, and sometimes revolutionary contestation (Holland, 1973). Indeed, colonists learned debate from The Columbian Orator (Bingham, 1797/1998) which offered diverse training in argumentation through reading and performance in classical literature and in the public disputes of the bustling multi-racial, multi-ethnic, garrulous young United States of America. The tradition of argumentation and debate as a form of practice continued through the 19th century in boisterous parades, public assemblies, civic performances, and oratorical addresses. Debate and interpretation were present in university life, too, changing over time to meet interests of emergent generations within and against the confines of university administration. In realizing ambitions to become a discipline, the study of communication performed a modern turn, too. Theory was brought on board to enable researchers to classify types or dimensions of communication and, thereby, to measure effects. Similarly, argumentation was theorized as a perspective taken on communication that could be analyzed by modeling practical reason (Brockriede, 1992). The turn I made in 1982 was to read the boundaries of communication in acts of argument. Such critical communication inquiry holds that any particular act of argument, custom of practice, or institutional convention carries with it expectations--which themselves could be granted and extended or disputed and taken to task. The test of taken-for-granted rules for communication is whether they are necessary or sufficient for the communicative work of agreement or disagreement. As a project, public sphere studies was a turn to keep in mind the argumentativeness of argument, the contingency of human cultural creations which define reasonableness or take exception to the unreasonable--always with an uncertain risk of being misplaced or simply wrong. …

By contrast with the judges and the advocates, the issue of race and gender representivity in the attorneys segment of the legal profession generally and in large corporate law firms specifically has not received significant attention, in part due to the lack of accurate statistics and a thin research tradition. Addressing the gap, a 2013 survey investigated the demographics of legal professionals in large corporate law firms in South Africa. The chief finding of the survey is that South Africa’s major corporate law firms are still dominated by white men, especially in their upper echelons. Further, nearly half of the African women professionally employed in large corporate law firms (48.1%) are candidate attorneys, which is to say non-admitted legal professionals. These findings are consistent with the few earlier studies that have been conducted and indicate the need for further detailed research into the social dynamics of the African legal profession.