Women Lawyers Research Articles

Pathways of Legal Advocacy for Change: Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association

Changing the legal environment can have transformative impacts on the lives of the most vulnerable. However, little is known about how legal advocacy can effectively achieve this within contexts where governments are not receptive to advocacy of this nature. This article outlines the activities of the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA) as it played a focal role in changing the Family Law, making important progress to removing aspects of the law that discriminated against women. We outline the ‘pathway’ of change taken by the organization, which moved from service provision to building an evidence-based, formal and informal advocacy, and finally utilizing critical junctures to encourage change to the law. This article also highlights the important role of enabling environments, as after several successful efforts of legal advocacy, the government closed down the operational space for legal advocacy, effectively stifling continued, or any new forms of, legal advocacy. This article provides insight on successful approaches to legal advocacy in challenging governance contexts as well as the limitations and opportunities that external actors can have.

Exclusion and Inclusion in the Legal Professions: Negotiating Gender in Central and East Central Europe, 1887–1945

This article examines the struggle by women to gain access to higher education opportunities in law and to secure the right to work in the legal profession between the 1880s through the 1940s in Central and East Central Europe. Activists challenged the exclusion of women from universities and the field of law by testing meritocratic and democratic principles or holding to account constitutional commitments to equality. The lawyers’ movement they subsequently created acted as a spearhead for the legal wing of the women’s emancipation movement that sought to reform women’s rights in national legislation and the civil codes. These processes were integral to the negotiation of gender roles in Central European countries from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Moreover, the rise of pan-European female lawyers’ associations illustrates the broader significance of these legal struggles. In the history of the women’s rights movements, the right to work in the legal professions and in civil service was also integral to the larger struggle for full citizenship rights.

Gender, Law, and Culture in the Legal Workplace: A Chilean Case Study

To examine law and culture’s effects on labor conditions of male and female lawyers, the author interviewed Chilean lawyers. The study found that the reality of women’s family responsibilities and stereotypes about women’s weaknesses as work leaders harm women lawyers’ careers. Although the law permits mothers to share their six-month post-natal leaves with fathers, fathers rarely take leaves because of societal and employer disapproval, a practice that reinforces traditional separation of male and female roles. The article concludes that culture has an even greater effect than law on the gendered conditions of lawyers’ work, but that law also may affect behavior. Culture is not static, and lawmakers should consider law’s effects and unintended consequences to propose new legislation to correct inequities.

What the Mind Knows the Eye Sees

In the April 2017 issue of The Journal for Nurse Practitioners, I published a column about the impact of the systematic exclusion of women from health research. What was once referred to as sexism and we now call gender bias is considered the fundamental cause for most of the disadvantages that women have encountered in society, family relationships, health care, and the workplace through the centuries. The existence and results of gender bias are well-documented in scholarly journals and the popular press. Recently, an article appeared in my news feed about a study that was undertaken to examine gender bias in the courtroom. The report described an experiment in which the researchers used an actual court case to see if subjects would critique the closing argument of 6 seasoned trial attorneys differently depending on the gender of the attorney. Although the attorneys delivered the exact same angry presentation to several groups of male and female test viewers, the performances of the 3 female lawyers were consistently described in significantly different terms than that of their 3 male counterparts. The male attorneys were assessed to be commanding, powerful, competent, and hirable. The females were described as shrill, hysterical, grating, and obnoxious. 1 Salerno J.M. Phalen H.J. Reyes R.N. Schweitzer N.J. Closing with emotion: the differential impact of male versus female attorneys expressing anger in court. Law Hum Behav. 2018 Jun 25; ([Epub ahead of print])https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000292 Crossref PubMed Scopus (19) Google Scholar The researchers opined that because women are viewed more negatively than men when expressing anger it might adversely affect their ability to advance in their careers. I would suggest that it might also determine the fate of their clients. To most of our readers, this may not be shocking news. Nevertheless, gender bias and its pervasive existence in society are important issues that have implications for women’s psychological and physical well-being. Department Editor Denise G. Link, PhD, WHNP-BC, CNE, FAANP, FAAN, is a clinical professor at Arizona State University College of Nursing and Health Innovation in Phoenix. Denise welcomes ideas for future columns and can be reached at

Closing with emotion: The differential impact of male versus female attorneys expressing anger in court.

Emotion expression is a key part of trial advocacy. Attorneys are advised to gain credibility with juries by demonstrating conviction through anger expression. In 3 experiments, we tested whether expressing anger in court makes attorneys more effective and whether this depends on their gender. We randomly assigned participants (n = 120 undergraduates) to view a male or female attorney presenting the same closing argument in either a neutral or angry tone (Experiment 1). They reported their impressions of the attorney and how likely they would be to hire the attorney. People used the positive aspects of anger (e.g., conviction, power), to justify hiring an angry male attorney. Yet, they used the negative aspects of anger (e.g., shrill, obnoxious), to justify not hiring a female attorney. We replicated this effect in Experiment 2 with a community sample (n = 294). Experiment 3 (n = 273) demonstrated that the attorney anger by gender interaction generalized to perceptions of effectiveness across a set of additional attorney targets. Finally, a high-powered analysis collapsing across experiments confirmed that when expressing anger relative to when calm, female attorneys were seen as significantly less effective, while angry male attorneys were seen as significantly more effective. Women might not be able to harness the persuasive power of expressing anger in the courtroom, which might prevent female attorneys from advancing in their careers. (PsycINFO Database Record

Unconscious Gender Bias Scale Development and Multi-industry Validation

Unconscious gender bias is a pervasive problem with significant negative outcomes for both organizations–in terms of financial and social performance –and individual employees–in terms of work contributions and well-being. This study is among the first to comprehensively measure how women leaders experience unconscious gender bias. Using a sample of female higher education executives (N=488), faith-based organization leaders (N=298), and physicians (N=293), the present research creates and validates the Scale for Unconscious Bias Towards Women Leaders (SUBTLE) instrument. Initial results show a reduction in the theoretical model from 27 leadership barriers to 15 latent factors, further lending a clearer understanding of how unconscious gender bias operates within workplace cultures. A fourth industry sample of female attorneys (N=395) provides the opportunity for replication and testing of the predictive ability of the SUBTLE instrument on organizationally relevant variables such as workplace satisfaction, turnover intention, promotional history, and salary. Implications for management and avenues for future research are discussed.

Nevertheless They Persisted: Gendered Frameworks and Socialization Advantages in Indian Professional Service Firms.

This article uses the Indian case to offer nuance to narratives about the gendered experience of professional work. I find that while gendered constructs certainly infiltrate all workspaces, there remain occupational and organizational differences in the ways in which women experience their environments. Particularly, while Indian women lawyers overall are more disadvantaged than their international counterparts, the experience of women lawyers in very elite law firms is more favorable than both their local and global peers. A confluence of factors might be responsible for this unusual experience of professional work, but this article highlights the importance of one set of supply side dynamics: the variations in socializing experiences and expectations before entry into these firms. In doing so, it adds to the literature that suggests the importance of not just enrollment parity, but also early training and institutional socialization for gender egalitarian professional outcomes.

여성변호사 경력구축 과정에서의 젠더불평등

여성변호사 경력구축 과정에서의 젠더불평등

Predictors of Negative Reactions to Female Attorneys Expressing Anger in Court

We conducted secondary data analyses on two experiments examining reactions to attorney anger expressing in court. In two experiments, participants viewed a video of a closing statement. The closing statement was delivered by either a male or a female trial attorney in a calm or angry tone. Participants completed measures of perceptions of how effective the attorney was, and several individual difference factors that might predict greater bias against angry female attorneys (i.e ambivalent sexism scale, political conservatism, age). Across two experiments we found that individual difference measures that were theorized to be related to participants’ endorsement of traditional gender roles determined the level of bias against angry female attorneys. Angry (versus calm) female attorneys were penalized more and angry (versus calm) male attorneys were rewarded more as individual difference proxies for endorsing traditional gender roles increased (i.e., benevolent sexism, political conservatism, and age). Thus, the gender bias we demonstrated is likely to be due, in part, to the fact that angry women are being penalized for violating traditional gender roles by expressing anger, while angry men are being rewarded for conforming to traditional gender roles by expressing anger—despite the fact that the attorneys were all delivering the same exact arguments and similar displays of anger.

The Role of Gender Norms in Judicial Decision-Making at the U.S. Supreme Court: The Case of Male and Female Justices

Although still a minority, the growing number of women on both the Bench and at the Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court has important implications for judicial decision-making and successful advocacy at the Court. Research in judicial behavior generally focuses on vote direction and the presence of female attorneys in a case. We offer a more nuanced account of how gender impacts both attorney success and judicial decision-making by drawing on work in social and political psychology and utilizing quantitative textual analysis to explore the tension between masculine norms of behavior that are valued in the legal profession and feminine norms of behavior that are expected of women, but devalued in the legal profession. Based on the Court’s long-standing disdain for emotional arguments, we examine how the emotional content in 601 party briefs shapes the Court’s majority opinions. Our results indicate that male justices evaluate counsel based on their compliance with traditional gender norms—rewarding male counsel for cool, unemotional arguments and rewarding female counsel for emotionally compelling arguments. However, we find no evidence that gender norms shape the opinions of female justices. Given that the justice system is supposed to be “blind,” our results highlight the durability of gendered expectations and raise questions about the objectivity of judicial decision-making.

A Legal Maternal Wall? No Revolution in Motherhood for Women Lawyers in England

In spite of significant change since their entry into the legal profession in 1922 in England and Wales, the slower progression of women on the professional ladder, their relative confinement to certain areas of the law and, consequently, the small proportion they account for in the senior judiciary remain blatant. Yet, undermining the ‘trickle-up’ argument, women now outnumber men among law students, achieve better academic results on the whole, and have made up around 50% of the profession at entry level for about twenty years: plus ca change…? The article presents a case study focusing on gender equality issues in the legal profession in England and Wales that underlines the specific weight of motherhood in the slow transformation of women’s role vis-a-vis that of men. The author implements the concept of maternal wall (Swiss & Walker, 1993), which looks at the pay gap but also at other impacts of maternity in terms of career and discrimination. Applied to the English legal profession, this sheds light on the testimonies of women barristers and solicitors who have often said they believed there was no sex discrimination, but that discrimination on the grounds of maternity was rife. On a theoretical level, this leads the author to argue for the construction of maternity and motherhood as intersectional identity facets, so as to avoid the two-fold pitfall of naturalization and essentialism. On a practical level, the hours, the specific timetable constraints, the role of clerks in chambers, etc., all contribute to a perpetuation of patriarchy in the profession. By relying on examples derived from fieldwork as well as the existing literature on the subject, the paper aims to show that in spite of an accurate statutory frame and the enforcement of internal gender equality policies in a rapidly expanding sector, the overall imbalance of power between men and women lawyers (and therefore judges) has not shifted.

Actions speak louder than words: how employees mind the implementation gap

Integral to employees’ working lives are the HR policies and more importantly, the practices that follow those and their implementation, which employees experience directly. To date, research on HR implementation considers how HRM is ‘done to’ employees by management and therefore ignores the agency of individuals to shape how HRM is ‘done to them’. Taking the perspective of employees, in a qualitative study of female lawyers, this paper examines employees’ roles in shaping HR implementation, addressing a lack of understanding about the role of ‘others’ in the process. Drawing on the concept of social power, the article focuses on the implementation of agile working practices within UK-based law firms. It finds that despite lacking legitimate position power to influence processes, employees draw on a variety of other power sources (e.g. referent, information, coercive) and tactics (e.g. leveraging membership of professional networks) in order to influence their working environment with respect to HR policy and practice, particularly in response to perceived implementation gaps. The current study underlines that employees may be integral to bridging the gap between policy and practice and therefore to ensuring the link between HRM and organisational performance. It also proposes that behavioural responses to HR practices should be considered in future theorising of the HRM-performance relationship.

Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy Associated With Work-Place Bullying.

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (TC) is a condition of transient left ventricular dysfunction precipitated by acute physical or emotional stress. The pathogenesis of TC is not well understood, but it is known to predominantly affect postmenopausal women in the context of physical or emotional triggers. To describe a case of TC with an association to a never previously described work place stressor of bullying. A 48-year-old female lawyer developed acute chest pain after experiencing significant emotional distress at a workplace meeting. She had experienced 18 months of increasing work-related mental stress in a new managerial role. She was initially thought to have a non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) with widespread T wave inversion on electrocardiogram and elevated serial troponin. However, a diagnosis of TC was subsequently made given the characteristic apical ballooning morphology of the left ventricle found on echocardiogram, normal coronary arteries on angiography and a normal echocardiogram 3 weeks later. This case report describes TC in a younger demographic and a link with workplace bullying. Chronic workplace bullying has the potential for serious physical harm by precipitating Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.

“Kohtuniku amet on liiga raske neile”: Eesti naisjuristide pürgimisest kohtunikuks kahe maailmasõja vahelisel perioodil [Abstract: “Judge’s work is too hard for them”: aspirations of Estonian female lawyers to become a judge in the interwar period

This article discusses the aspirations of two Estonian female lawyers – Auguste Susi-Tannebaum and Olli Olesk – to become a judge in the 1920s. Estonian women were already allowed to study the field of law in the early years of the twentieth century. The possibilities for obtaining a law degree expanded with the foundation of the Republic of Estonia, when female students gained the right to enrol in the university on an equal footing with male students. Nevertheless, it turned out to be much harder to start working in their chosen field: before the Second World War, out of 143 women who had graduated from the Faculty of Law, only 42 were practising lawyers. The first female notary started working only in 1936. No female lawyer became a judge in Estonia before the Second World War, and the first female judges were appointed during the Soviet era in the period of 1940–41. 
 Auguste Susi-Tannebaum and Olli Olesk had graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Tartu and were members of the Estonian Bar Association. However, the applications submitted by Susi-Tannebaum (1924) and Olesk (1929) for candidacy to join the judge’s profession were rejected. Both women contested the negative decisions in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court was guided by the principle of gender equality and implicitly expressed its opinion that female lawyers who apply for a position as a judge cannot be excluded from the candidacy on the grounds of gender.
 Regardless of the Supreme Court’s opinion, it was possible to exclude women from the competition for judge’s positions on the basis of the law granting the chairman of the National Court of Appeal (Kohtupalat) the exclusive right to decide on the suitability of candidates without the obligation of justifying the decision.
 Thus, the cases of Susi-Tannebaum and Olesk indicate how female lawyers who wanted to become judges ended up in a vicious circle: first, the negative response from the National Court of Appeal was followed by the favourable opinion of the Supreme Court on gender equality. Thereafter the Court of Appeal was able to make a further negative (and legally correct) decision on the non-compliance of a candidate for “informal reasons”, without any additional explanation. As it was not obligatory to justify the negative decision, women were deprived of the opportunity to become judges in the 1920s and 1930s.
 In 1936, the position of the head of the Tartu Guardianship and Custodianship Court was given to Ljubov Hütsi, whom the general public considered the first female judge. However, the guardianship and custodianship court was an administrative institution rather than a genuine court of law. It was subject to judicial control and thus the person appointed as the head of such an institution by the Minister of Internal Affairs cannot be considered a judge.
 During the 1940s, repressions and the replacement of previous lawyers offered new employment opportunities for women. Regrettably, several women who were appointed judges from 1940 to 1941 had no higher education in law, and some of them did not even have any kind of legal education. In this period, having a legal education was not a priority, because loyalty to the Soviet regime and membership in the Communist Party were more important prerequisites.

Soolise võrdõiguslikkuse küsimus Eesti Vabariigi põhiseadustes ja riigikohtu praktikas 1920–1940 [Abstract: Gender equality in constitutions and Supreme Court cases in the Republic of Estonia in 1920–1940

The purpose of the article is to analyse the principle of gender equality laid down in the interwar Estonian constitutions and to study the relevant court cases at the highest level of appeal in the Supreme Court of the Republic of Estonia (1920–40).
 When Estonia granted equality rights with the constitution of 1920 and all citizens, men and women alike, were declared to be equal before the law, it placed Estonia among the vanguard of nations in Europe in support of gender equality. The amendment of the constitution in 1933 left the equality principle unchanged. In the new constitution, which went into effect in 1938, gender equality was extended to relations in marriage as well.
 In the twentieth century, the focus was not on the equality of genders as such, but rather on women’s equality compared to men, and the main question was how to improve women’s rights to gain the equality promised in the constitution. On 1 September 1924, the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court made a judgment which could be considered the first important court case about women’s rights in Estonia. The Supreme Court issued a complaint submitted by a female lawyer, who challenged a lower court judgement that she – as a woman – was not suitable to be appointed to the position of judge candidate. According to the Supreme Court, the only constitutionally uniform solution that would support gender equality was that all persons – men and women – on the same grounds had the right to become a judge candidate and enter the judiciary in Estonia. However, the court system of the interwar independent Republic of Estonia remained traditionally masculine without any female judiciary, which is in turn indicative not so much of legal, but rather of pragmatic questions about social attitudes.
 The exploration of tensions in society engendered by the ambition to bring women into positions of authority and to grant women rights in the private family sphere as well, leads to two main conclusions. First, despite the formal equality that was granted by both constitutions of the Republic of Estonia adopted in 1920 and 1937, women’s efforts, e.g. opening the judiciary to women, were met with a degree of ironical resistance, and general emphasis on women’s rights even drew attention to presumable positive discrimination as well. Estonia’s foreign minister Ants Piip wrote an article in the magazine Constitutional Review about the first constitution of the Republic of Estonia in 1925: “It is interesting to note that despite this provision, many laws exist which protect women in industry, thereby discriminating favourably against men.” 
 Since both the 1920 and the 1937 constitution granted gender equality in public, not in the private sphere, the traditional gap between women’s legal position and that of men generally remained unchanged in private family law. Thus, the Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Estonia confirmed in 1937 that it was in accordance with the principle of gender equality to restrict the possibilities for married women compared to men to make a testament without any mandatory advisor. According to the court’s reasoning, the regulation was constitutional because the law of succession and the right to make a testament belonged not to the public but to the private sphere. Thereafter, female lawyers drew attention to the fact that a married woman could legally become a judge or a minister – at least it was not prohibited or excluded – and decide the fate of a nation, since this right belonged to the public sphere. And still at the same time, a married woman’s competence to transact in the private sphere was limited compared to men. However, the constitution that went into effect in 1937 brought some changes, since equality in marriage was additionally granted, for instance. Unfortunately, the implementation period of the new constitution was limited to about two years, thus there is no case law to confirm that the constitution brought specific changes in practice.

Private pain versus public shame: González Sinde’s female lawyer in La suerte dormida/Sleeping Luck (2003)

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the representation of a female lawyer whose personal tragedy encourages her to become a heroine lawyer for the socially disadvantaged. It explores a female filmmaker’s account of a woman lawyer fighting for a lost cause and examines in what way the public/private, law/justice and reason/emotion dichotomies are played out in her public performance and private life. Central to my discussion will be the significance of emotion in filmmaking, law and social justice. I use Carl Plantinga’s seminal work on the emotional experience of the spectator and his cognitive-perceptual account of the viewing process, and combine it with a fruitful discussion of the genre of female lawyer films, as theorized by Cynthia Lucia and Orit Kamir in two pioneering studies on female lawyer films. This article fills a significant critical gap in the field of Spanish law and film. Positioned at the intersection between law, film and emotion, it gives space to a productive cross-fertilization of theories of spectatorship and the female lawyer film.

Nevertheless They Persisted: Gendered Frameworks and Socialization Advantages in Indian Professional Service Firms

This article uses the Indian case to offer further nuance to these narratives about the impact of global cultures on the gendered experience of professional work. I find that while gender certainly infiltrates all workspaces through the framework of a background identity, there remain occupational and organizational differences in the ways in which women experience their environments. Particularly, while Indian women lawyers overall are more disadvantaged in many ways than their international counterparts, women lawyers in very elite law firms do much better than both their local and global peers. A confluence of factors might be responsible for this unusual experience of professional work, but this Article highlights the importance of one set of supply side dynamics: the variations in socializing experiences and expectations before professionals enter elite firms. In doing so, it adds to the literature that suggests the importance of early training and educational socialization for gender egalitarian outcomes in the workforce (e.g. Cech 2015; Seron et al. 2016). It also lends credence to the “pipeline” fix for gender equality by highlighting the substantive influence of increased representation on the ways men and women both think about their careers. Further, it reveals the particular global stickiness of gender frameworks (Ridgeway 2011): all sites are gendered, but the specification of these gendered identities are impacted by their respective embedded cultural contexts.

Supplemental Material for Closing With Emotion: The Differential Impact of Male Versus Female Attorneys Expressing Anger in Court

Supplemental Material for Closing With Emotion: The Differential Impact of Male Versus Female Attorneys Expressing Anger in Court

Finding Justice: A History of Women Lawyers in Maryland since 1642 ed. by Lynne A. Battaglia

Finding Justice: A History of Women Lawyers in Maryland since 1642 ed. by Lynne A. Battaglia

Third Generation Discrimination: The Ripple Effects of Gender Bias in the Workplace

Third Generation Discrimination: The Ripple Effects of Gender Bias in the Workplace