Sep

14

The Making of a Law Professor

Posted by: | September 14, 2011 | 1 Comment

There’s an adage in law that claims that the students who earned As in law school become law professors, the students who earned Bs become partners, and the students who earned Cs become judges.  I can’t verify that the adage is correct, but there is some truth to the first part.  Typically law professors had [...]

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Aug

18

The Constitutional Equality of Women

Posted by: | August 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment

For young women coming of age today, their equality with men seems assured.  As youngsters they’ve played on co-ed sports teams; they’ve often been more successful than boys in school; they’ve pursued careers in previously male-dominated fields like math and science, medicine and law.  For them, women have always been able to vote, abortion has [...]

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Aug

16

Mabel Watson Raimey

Posted by: | August 16, 2011 | 2 Comments

Recently a friend lent me a wonderful book, More than Petticoats: Remarkable Wisconsin Women, by Greta Anderson.* The book biographies a number of notable Wisconsin women, but the biography that stood out the most to me was of Mabel Watson Raimey. Mabel Watson Raimey was the first African-American woman to attend Marquette University Law School. [...]

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Dec

21

How Women Lawyers Avoid the Likeability v. Competence Trap

Posted by: | December 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment

In a series of recent papers, Andrea Schneider has explored the “likeabilty v. competence” trap that seems to confront many women in leadership and professional positions.  In her view, the trap is typefied by media coverage of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin in the 2008 election.  Clinton was commonly portrayed as competent, but unlikeable, and Palin the [...]

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Apr

26

Sykes, Sotomayor, and Women Judges

Posted by: | April 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment

I had the opportunity last week to attend Women Judges’ Night, an event that the Association for Women Lawyers presents annually (indeed, this year’s dinner was the thirtieth such). The Hon. Diane S. Sykes, L’84, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, delivered what was billed as a keynote but was [...]

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Apr

21

Gender Frustrations

Posted by: | April 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment

I have taken a week to think about how to blog about a session that I saw last weekend at the ABA Conference.  The session was about using movies to demonstrate gender differences in negotiation, and I went to see what teaching tools might be provided.  I was on the negotiation program track for the ABA, [...]

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Apr

17

Overcoming Gender Stereotypes: What Can Law Schools Do?

Posted by: | April 17, 2010 | 2 Comments

As Andrea Schneider observes in a new article, media coverage of the 2008 election nicely illustrates the dilemma facing many women in leadership roles: they are apt to be perceived as either competent but unlikeable (the way that Hillary Clinton was often portrayed) or likeable but incompetent (the way that Sarah Palin was often portrayed).  [...]

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Mar

6

What Queen Esther Knew

Posted by: | March 6, 2010 | 3 Comments

Last weekend I was reading an article with a the great title, “The Glass Ceiling is Kind of a Bummer”: Women’s Reflections on a Gender Development Course, which talked about how undergraduate women often, even as they are in women’s studies courses, deny the impact that sexism has had or will potentially have on their [...]

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Aug

26

Female Supervisors Face Significant Sexual Harassment

Posted by: | August 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Probably not a big surprise to many readers out there that female supervisors are still harassed in large numbers, but the fact that this study show that they are harassed more than non-supervisor female employees is just a little surprising to me (via MSNBC): Female managers are 137 percent more likely to experience sexual harassment [...]

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Apr

15

Brave Afghani Women Protest Law Change

Posted by: | April 15, 2009 | 2 Comments

Did you see this article in the New York Times this morning, about the 300 women protesting a new law that would give men in the Shiite minority community virtually complete control over the lives of their wives?  The NYT describes the law this way: The law, approved by both houses of Parliament and signed by President Hamid [...]

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