Women Lawyers Research Articles

Abstract P573: Educational Assortative Mating and Cardiovascular Outcomes

Objective: To estimate the association between educational assortative mating and cardiovascular outcomes among postmenopausal women in the Women’s Health Initiative study. Background: Between 1970 and 2015, the number of dual professional couples almost tripled. For instance, the likelihood of male attorneys marrying female lawyers and male doctors marrying female doctors has increased. Studies have proposed that educational assortative mating—people marry those with similar educational attainment--affects health disparities through increasing income inequality, creating differential levels of healthcare access, and based on the social cognitive theory, exchanging health knowledge and sharing healthy behaviors. Methods: We compared women living in three homogenous educational pairings; married women and spouses who both have 1) a high school degree or lower, 2) an associate or college degree, and 3) an MS, Ph.D., or professional degree. We used logistic regression models for prevalent outcomes (HTN, CHD, HF) at WHI baseline and Cox proportional hazard regression models for incident outcomes, all adjusted for age and total household income. To consider effect modification by membership in different racial or ethnic groups, we also conducted a stratified analysis. Results: We found significant associations between educational assortative mating and all cardiovascular outcomes within all groups of women. We found higher odds of prevalent cardiovascular outcomes ranging from 47 to 98 percent and a higher hazard of incident outcomes ranging from 24 to 56 percent. The strongest associations were found for prevalent and incident heart failure among Black women. Conclusion: This study provides evidence that educational assortative mating is likely a contributor to widening disparities in cardiovascular outcomes within and between racial groups of women.

Exploring the Impact of Women’s Representation on the Professional Careers of Women of Color

While existing approaches to workplace stratification illuminate how relational and demographic processes impact workplace inequalities, little research has sought to disaggregate the experiences of professional women at the intersection of race and ethnicity. This study explores how workplace demography intersects with relationships among women to shape the experiences of women of color in professional careers. Relying on a mixed methods study of barriers to advancement among women lawyers, we find that the presence of women in an organization has little to no effect on the token pressures women of color experience in predominantly White-male organizations. We conclude increasing women’s overall representation is necessary but insufficient for addressing the challenges women of color face navigating professional careers.

Concepts of Womanism/ Feminism in A Life Apart: An Autobiography by Prabha Khaitan

Even though the concept of Womanism has roots in Black Feminism, still it can form some relevance and connection with Indian Feminism. Alice Walker (1944-) an African Black woman writer has positioned “Womanist/Womanism” in her critically acclaimed collection of essays, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose”. Roughly, in Post-Independence India, women’s active involvement in politics advances their positions. The proportion of women in the Indian Education System skyrocketed. Due to awareness, Indian women make decisions in the realms of social, economic, and religious issues as well. Now, women lawyers, activists, politicians, administrators, and others focus on the upliftment of women’s conditions in India. These give birth to women-specific organizations, acts, amendments, and laws. In Indian Feminism based on the above-discussed layouts, there have been three waves in the last eighty years. Indian Womanism can be one of the most significant segments of Indian Feminism of the contemporary era. The primary aim of the Researcher is to conceptualize Indian Womanism while unwrapping the palimpsest narrative of Prabha Khaitan’s autobiography named A Life Apart. The second contention is to situate Prabha Khaitan as the best possible exemplar of an Indian Womanist instead of an Indian Feminist in the background of A Life Apart: An Autobiography.

ЖЕНЩИНЫ-ЮРИСТЫ РОССИЙСКОЙ ИМПЕРИИ НАКАНУНЕ И В УСЛОВИЯХ ПЕРВОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ

Higher legal education became available to Russian women at the beginning of the 20th century. There were many educational institutions in the country where women were allowed to receive such an education, at the same time, they had the opportunity to graduate from universities with degrees in law. The number of women lawyers increased dramatically, but they were barred from entering the legal profession. Attempts by some to become attorneys were unsuccessful, and the tsarist legislator did not allow women’s advocacy. Restrictions on employment in justice set up lawyers to fight for the right to work there on equal terms with men, and this struggle took on organized forms. The feminist Society of St. Petersburg Women Lawyers, founded in 1913, aimed to provide graduates of law faculties with full access to practical law, for which the issue of employment of female lawyers was specially studied, educational and propaganda activities were carried out. The conditions of the First World War served as a trigger for what was happening to a large extent. They accelerated the feminization of labor and the legal field was no exception. Due to mobilization, the legal profession had a loss in the male workforce, which hundreds of Russian women with legal qualifications were ready to make up. Not having the right to realized themselves in the courts, they first of all became workers of consultations, where they applied their knowledge and abilities in work related to the lawyer. For women lawyers of the Russian Empire, access to the legal profession was opened only after its fall, when the Provisional Government allowed women’s advocacy.

ACTing Like a Lawyer: An Affect Control Theory Explanation of Gender Gaps in Law

Despite increased parity, large gaps remain between men and women in law. The author proposes that the cultural meanings and everyday interactions in which lawyers engage may create a gendered institution that reifies the gender hierarchy. Using three universal dimensions of meaning, the author investigates differences in the meanings of lawyer-related identities by gender. The results show that across all of these identities, female-modified identities carry cultural meanings that are less powerful than nonmodified identities. Using affect control theory, the author develops hypotheses about the expectations for men and women lawyers when enacting behaviors coded as either adversarial or caring. The data suggest that women are perceived as gender deviant when engaging in adversarial behaviors, while men are perceived as gender deviant when engaging in communal behaviors. These empirical hypotheses suggest ways that cultural meanings shape how lawyers experience their daily work lives and have broad implications for the gender hierarchy in high-powered workplaces.

Information needs and seeking behaviour of lawyers based on gender and location in Imo State

This study investigated the information needs and seeking behaviour of lawyers based on gender and location in Imo State. Two research questions and hypotheses guided the study using a correlational research design. The population consists of 2,599 registered lawyers of Nigerian Bar Association Imo State Chapter. The sample for the study was 650, barristers. The Researcher used the stratified random sampling technique to select 325 male lawyers and female lawyers respectively with consideration to their location. A 40 item structured rating scale titled “Lawyers' Information Needs and seeking behaviour Scale (LINSBS)” validated by an expert in library and information science and two other experts in educational measurement and evaluation, was used for data collection. The reliability of the instrument was established at 0.84 using Cronbach’s alpha statistic. The data obtained were analyzed using frequency numbers and Chi Square (X2) contingency statistics to answer the research questions, so as to determine the magnitude of the relationship between the dependent and independent variables of the study. Chi Square (X2) test of independence statistic was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Among the findings of the study was that; the contingency coefficient for the influence of lawyers' gender, location and their information needs and seeking behaviour very low. That is to say that there is a very low relationship between lawyers' gender, location and their information needs and seeking behaviour. The relationship of lawyers' information needs and seeking behaviour is significant with lawyers' location but insignificant with lawyers' gender. Based on the findings, the study recommended among other things that government should provide unlimited access to information to lawyers because they play crucial role in the judiciary. This can be done by anchoring programmes that directly address the needs of Lawyers in electronic and print media. Lawyers, irrespective of their gender, location, years of experience, areas of specialization and academic qualifications should endeavour to use different sources for sourcing their information, so as to give reliable services to their clients.

Učiteljica Marija Milutinović Punktatorka - prva žena pravozastupnik u Srbiji

The paper shows the development of legal representation in the Principality of Serbia, with a special focus on the professional participation of women in court proceedings, shown through the character and work of Marija Milutinović Punktatorka, a teacher and the first female attorney in Serbia. In the judicial system of the Principality of Serbia, women were not prohibited from practicing law, which enabled an educated woman to pave the way for future women lawyers in the period of 'Little Serbia'. In the relevant literature, one can find rare texts in which the life and work of Marija Milutinović are mentioned casually and inconspicuously without an insight into the complete biography. By researching unpublished archival sources, significant information was obtained about the life and work of Marija Milutinović Punktatorka, the wife of the poet Sima Milutinović Sarajlija and the mother of the architect and professor of the Grande école, Dragutin (Dragiša) Milutinović. Marija Milutinović Punktatorka was born in 1809 into the Popović family in Timisoara. As the 'first Serbian' teacher, she educated girls and thus strove for women in the 19th century to fight for their place in the society. She was educated in Buda, where she also studied several sciences privately, with a 'very good approach and accuracy'. After the death of her husband, in October 1848, she opened a private elementary school in Belgrade. Soon, in 1849, she entered the civil service and started working as a teacher at the state school in Belgrade near the Great Church (Saborna crkva), where she received a pension in August 1874. Marija Milutinović's main motive to engage in legal representation stemmed from humane motives and not from material benefit. She practiced law even during her married life. She charged wealthier people, whom she successfully represented and won lawsuits in court with large compensation-modest, symbolic sums, more as a reward than as a fee (Ignjatović, 1860, p. 24). Even after her husband's death (1847), she continued to practice law and fulfil her husband's bequest, providing legal aid and representing the poor free of charge, which reflected badly on her impoverished family fund (Javor, 1862-1863; 1874-1893, p. 350). During the working life of Marija Milutinović, legal regulations did not prohibit women from practicing law, nor did the prohibition result indirectly. With the entry into force of the Law on Legal Representatives (1862), the previous decrees and orders, which often ad hoc solved the issue of providing legal aid in the Principality of Serbia. Officially, Marija Milutinović did not submit a request to be recognized as a lawyer before the competent authorities because she did not graduate from the Faculty of Law. In a formal sense, Marija Milutinović was never recognized by the Ministry as having the right to call herself a lawyer. Based on the real facts, it cannot be disputed that Marija Milutinović Punktatorka was the first woman in the Principality of Serbia to engage in a free profession, in this particular case, legal work.

The struggle for marital equality beyond Cold War political divides: transnational relationships between Polish and Spanish women lawyers in the 1960s and 1970s

ABSTRACT This article discusses the transnational relationships between women lawyers from Poland and Spain that developed within the International Federation of Women in Legal Careers (Fédération Internationale des Femmes des Carrières Juridiques, FIFCJ) from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Drawing on archival material and published sources, it traces the history of relations between the Spanish lawyer María Telo Núñez and the Spanish Association of Women Lawyers, and Zofia Wasilkowska and Maria Stypułkowska from the Section of Women Lawyers (Sekcja Kobiet Prawników, SKP) of the League of Women (Liga Kobiet) in Poland. Women lawyers from both countries joined the Federation at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, and met at international meetings, two of which were held in Warsaw and Madrid. This analysis focuses on the forms and meanings of exchange between these women and their influence on legal changes in civil and family legislation in Poland and Spain during the mid-1970s. Developing a mutual interest in the family law of both countries, these women strategically framed their activity as apolitical. Transnational relationships between lawyers and activists from two contrasting dictatorships reveal the importance of professional networking in overcoming political and ideological divides in the struggle for women’s rights in Cold War Europe.

Great expectations and hard times:- the advent of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 and women’s entry to the legal profession

ABSTRACT The 23 December 1919 ushered in a new dawn for women: the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 (SDRA) received Royal Assent, thus finally enabling women to join the professions, and in particular the legal profession. This legislation was not a benign gift from the establishment in recognition of women’s war effort, but rather the result of a successful feminist campaign vociferously fought for by women and supportive men. Newspapers, both local and national, greeted women’s admission to the professions with both celebration and hope, and so did some women. However other women were ambivalent about the SDRA, and welcomed it because it was better than nothing. These women predicted a harder and more prolonged struggle for substantive equality lay ahead. Their foreshadowing was proved correct, as inequality is still rife in the legal profession today. This article will explore some contemporaneous newspaper commentary on the passing of the SDRA, and compare and contrast it with what is known of the legal careers of the first cohort of women lawyers. These reports provide us with an invaluable insight and understanding of the passing of the Act, the hopes and expectations, as well as the doubts and disbeliefs.

Irene Barclay (1894-1989): the extraordinary career of the first woman chartered surveyor, and the development of the housing management profession

ABSTRACT The lives and careers of early medical doctors have long been studied, and early women lawyers have been the subject of considerable academic and professional activity particularly in the years leading up to the centenary of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, but comparatively little attention has been paid to early chartered surveyors. This paper introduces Irene Barclay, the first woman to qualify as a chartered surveyor, in 1922. Her family background informed her politics and ethos and her career choice will be set against a consideration of the career options available, the preparation for a professional life laid by Octavia Hill’s house manager training system and the development and professionalisation of housing management after Hill’s death. Barclay’s place in urging and mentoring other women to professional qualification is reviewed, along with the role of professional and women’s networks. The paper draws on Barclay’s work in the public and private sector (simultaneously) over a career lasting from just after World War I until her retirement in 1972 and finds that, after the opportunities opened from 1919, the progress of women in chartered surveying was, into the twenty-first century, still very slow and continues to be low (with on 15% female in 2020).

Dissatisfied, but not discouraged: the effects of French female lawyers perceiving gender discrimination

Abstract Previous research has suggested not only that gender discrimination is widespread in law firms, conditioning women’s career paths and full integration into the legal profession, but also that female lawyers are more likely than their male counterparts to perceive unfair treatment. However, little research exists on how female lawyers’ perceptions of gender discrimination may affect their individual work experiences, in particular their attitudes toward their job and their career. This article aims to fill this gap by examining how perceived gender discrimination affects female lawyers’ job satisfaction with their career prospects and work–life balance, as well as their intentions to leave the legal profession. With a focus on the under-researched French case, it draws on the quantitative analysis of the data collected from an online survey administered to 663 female Parisian lawyers. Results show that perceptions of discrimination negatively affect women’s satisfaction with regard to their career prospects and work–life balance, but do not have any influence on their quitting intentions. By adopting a ‘view from below’ on the individual work experiences of female lawyers, the article sheds new light on the dynamics of women’s disadvantage in legal careers.

Pluralistic Professionalisms: Religious Identity, Excluded Voice, and a Toolkit for the Periphery


 Assimilation of new entrants into the legal profession has been a signature strain of Carrie Menkel-Meadow’s research. Even if the empirical particularities have since evolved, her pathbreaking research on women lawyers and gendered lawyering processes remain prime examples of socio-legal work on lawyers with important theoretical extensions. For example, in Portia in a Different Voice, her now classic piece from 1985, Menkel-Meadow analyzes how numbers alone are insufficient indicia of feminization within the legal profession. Beyond the description of the state of the legal profession at the time of writing, her argument that we should pay attention to what lawyers do rather than how many of them there are changed a line of scholarship about lawyer demography and demanded that it pay more attention to experience and nuance in what could seem like a critical mass. Similarly, in 1987, while analyzing the assimilation of minority groups, she asks, in productive provocation, “Is assimilation a desirable goal?” to suggest that excluded voices might—even when seemingly included— suffer from everyday exclusion because they do not have access to the kinds of social and economic capital necessary for true inclusion. In another line of research focused on legal institutions and decision-making metrics rather than systems and experiences of lawyers, Menkel-Meadow discusses her now-eminent theory of “process pluralism”: the idea that a range of embedded processes need to merge in client-forward ways to offer meaningful justice. Although Menkel-Meadow’s work on the empirical legal profession has been what has most directly influenced my own scholarly inquiry, this theoretical kernel from her dispute resolution research inspires extending the analyses to new kinds of diversity in the legal profession.
 
 Following the spirit of her research focused on bespoke hybridization, this Article merges these two lines of significant theory across interrelated fields to consider “pluralistic professionalisms”—pluralism in professional values and identity—by focusing on the experience of Muslim actors in contemporary legal landscapes. Although scholarship has reinforced the myriad ways in which identity capital within the legal profession is built and valorized, religion complicates the analysis because it involves the performance of not just an individual’s identity, but also its additional interaction with law’s neutrality and its presumptions—despite enough evidence to the contrary—of secularity. Islam further exposes cleavages in these intersectionalities because of the way this particular religious identity is gendered, racialized, and read, especially in the Global North, often under the violent pretense of “liberal” progress.
 
 
 
 In contending with this complicated juxtaposition, this Article argues for paying attention to a particular kind of process pluralism in the creation of professional identity. Part II outlines the ways in which Menkel-Meadow’s scholarship on diversity and identity in the legal profession creates what I refer to as a “toolkit for the periphery” that allows us to consider new kinds of professional entrants and navigations. Part III unpacks the ways in which religious identity and performance complicates the analysis of identity alterity and uses Menkel-Meadow’s process pluralism as a way to consider these conjunctions. Part IV uses data from an ongoing Navigating Identities in Legal Education (“NILE”) project, as well as case law on Islamophobic workplace discrimination, to reveal the ways in which “ideal” or “good” identities of the Muslim lawyer are constructed in post-September 11, 2001 (“9/11”) America. The concluding Part V employs the concept of pluralistic professionalisms to make sense of the data in the previous section and to extend these two seemingly under-connected strains in Menkel-Meadow’s research centering on process pluralism and professional identity. Although the Islamic identity and the experiences of Muslim lawyers are the focal points of this Essay, the argument for professional pluralism—much like Menkel-Meadow’s research—extends beyond the particularities of this specific case.
 
 
 
 

Russian feminitives: what can corpus data tell us?

Recent years have seen considerable debate concerning Russian feminitives, i.e. derived formations that designate female professionals, such as advokatka, advokatša, advokatessa, ženščina-advokat or advokat-ženščina that all refer to female lawyers. In this article, we investigate the use of feminitives based on data from the Araneum Russicum Maximum corpus and the Russian National Corpus. It is shown that the choice of feminitive to some extent depends on the morphophonological properties of the base word. It is furthermore argued that suffixed feminitives are more frequent than compounds like ženščina-advokat and advokat-ženščina, and that the distribution has changed over time. Suffixed feminitives reveal a stronger tendency to combine with gender-related epithets (e.g., obajatel’naja agentka ‘charming agent’), while the type ženščina-X is frequently used with the epithet pervyj ‘first’. Our article is an empirical study of the actual use of feminitives in corpus data, which we hope will inform future metalinguistic discussion and prescriptivist thinking about feminitives in Russian.

Understanding of Perceived Gender Discrimination Phenomenon among Women in the Pakistani Context

The present research was planned for qualitative exploration of perceived gender discrimination in the Pakistani context on the lines of relative deprivation theoretical background. Five focus group discussions (N = 35) with working, non-working, married, and single adult women and two in-depth interviews with gender rights social activist and female lawyer were conducted. Their age range was 22-40 years with a mean age of 28.56 years. Content analysis technique revealed eight distinct domains as the main categories of discrimination perceived by women on the basis of gender, namely, education, employment/career, familial matters, financial matters, general social rights, appreciation and encouragement, abuse and violence, and gender-based stereotyping. Participants reported that despite offering more sacrifices and compromises, as compared to men the subsequent appreciation and encouragement given to them is non-existent. This contributed to one of the important and unique themes of perceived discrimination.

Power, Gender, and Race in the Legal Profession

This piece is a transcript of the final keynote address at the forty-third Annual Women in Law Dinner, delivered on 5 March 2020 by Dr. Carol Liao at the Fairmont Hotel, Vancouver, British Columbia, the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, one week before the city went into COVID-19 lockdown. The event was hosted by the University of British Columbia Allard Law Women’s Caucus and attended by over three hundred women lawyers and their supporters. Dr. Liao received a standing ovation following her speech.

The Gender Pay Gap and High-Achieving Women in the Legal Profession

Although women have made significant strides in the legal profession, female attorneys continue to earn far less than male attorneys. Relying on survey data from a large sample of full-time attorneys in Texas, we find a gender pay gap of thirty-five thousand dollars at the median that cannot be explained by differences in human capital or occupational segregation. We also provide evidence that the legal market especially disadvantages women who excel in law school. Whereas high academic achievement boosts male lawyers’ incomes substantially, it does not have the same effect on female lawyers’ incomes. High-achieving female lawyers earn less than high-achieving male lawyers across practice settings and earn less than their lower-achieving male counterparts in private practice. We conclude that discrimination in the legal profession operates partly by devaluing female attorneys’ human capital, such that sterling academic credentials and other traits that are valued in men are far less valued in women.

Gender Differences in Psychological Distress and Psychological Well-Being among Lawyers

Objective: This study was designed to find the gender differences in psychological distress and psychological well-being (PWB) among lawyers.Study Design: Cross sectional study.Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted from January 2018 to April 2018 at Islamabad and Rawalpindi High courts.Materials and Methods: Purposive sampling technique was used. A sample of 110 lawyers (male=55 & female =55) were recruited for the study. Two scales, psychological distress-10 and psychological well-being was used for data collection.Results: For the investigation of relationship Pearson, product moment correlation was computed with the help of SPSS-21v. The results indicated that both parameters (psychological distress and psychological well-being) were negatively correlated (r=-.40). To examine the gender regarding differences T-test was used. Significant gender related difference was observed on psychological distress (t=2.09, p<.05) where female lawyers reported higher level of distress than male lawyers, whereas on well-being non-significant gender difference was found.Conclusion: The findings of our study concluded that lawyers with high psychological distress reported lower level of psychological well-being; and overall female lawyers experienced more psychological distress (because of extra responsibilities of profession, home, and family) than their male counterparts. 
 How to cite this: Arzeen N, Hamid M, Shah M, Arzeem, Mustafa G, Hassan Z. Gender Differences in Psychological Distress and Psychological Well-Being among Lawyers. Life and Science. 2022; 3(2): 75-78. doi: http://doi.org/10.37185/LnS.1.1.192
 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

The burnout syndrome in a woman lawyer in the city of Manaus

This article is part of a master’s thesis presented at the Universidad Europea del Atlántico that dealt with a field research that investigated: The burnout syndrome in a lawyer from the city of Manaus, and had as a problem: what are the effects of the burnout syndrome in women lawyer from the city of Manaus? Its general objective was to analyze the cases of syndrome of female lawyers in the city of Manaus, seeking to understand its effects on the daily life of the same. Five women were interviewed who had presented the problem in the last 2 years in the city of Manaus, State of Amazonas, Brazil. The results indicate that the therapeutic approach is multimodal and is based on recommendations for the psychosomatic management of functional somatic syndromes, complemented by interventions related to the work situation. It is concluded that Burnout among female lawyers has been little studied. The main burnout factors of the investigated workers are: professional factors and a high level of responsibility.

You Think; Therefore I Am: Gender Schemas and Context in Oral Arguments at the Supreme Court, 1979–2016

Attorneys’ ability to secure justice-votes is shaped by gender schemas, subconscious expectations which hold women should use more emotion than men. This poses few problems for male attorneys since men and attorneys are both expected to avoid emotion. But, women are placed in a double-bind with competing professional and personal expectations. We argue gender schemas are not static rather they change with the context of the Court. Introducing a new dataset inclusive of all oral arguments from 1979 to 2016, we utilize quantitative textual analysis and find gender schemas predict securing justice-votes as the Bar becomes more diverse and justices become more conservative. Our results raise normative concerns about female attorneys’ ability to substantively contribute to the Court’s case law.

Why So Much Ado About a Hairdo? Examining How the Hair Choices of Black Women Vary by Occupation

To better understand negative stereotypes and biases against natural Black hairstyles (e.g., afros, braids, dreadlocks), this study examines the hair style choices of Black women working in four occupational groups (finance, medicine, law, and technology). Using literature on identity shifting, professional identity, and professional appearance norms, we predicted variation in the hairstyle choices of Black women employed in these four occupations. Results indicate Black women technology professionals were significantly more likely to wear natural hairstyles than any of the other three occupations. Black women lawyers were significantly less likely than either physicians or women in technology to wear natural hairstyles. As predicted, the more conservative and formal the work environment, the more likely Black woman adjust their hairstyle to mirror white standards of what is viewed as professional.