The Law School Experience for Women and What They Should Look for in an Employer

Women today are a critical mass in law schools, and Ladies' Days are a thing of the past, but in 1985 the Harvard Law Women's Association found it necessary to provide the faculty with a pamphlet about how to conduct a nonsexist, non-racist classroom, including the instruction "Don't Tell Sexist Jokes, Stories, Poems, or Parables." One contracts professor begins each year by asking women students whether any of them are feminists, as if feminism were something despicable rather than a commitment to sexual equality.


On a deeper level, in 1987 three Yale Law professors undertook a formal study of why many women find the law school experience so dissatisfying. The study was prompted by issues a group of first-year women students raised in 1985. These students reported feeling frustrated and silenced by what they perceived as male faculty members' and students' over involvement with abstractions and rules, lack of attention to the human and social context of cases, and dismissal of observations that women students made based on their life experiences. These students also cited concerns that have been cited in studies of educational institutions at every level. For example, a woman's answer to a teacher's question draws little response, but when a man makes the same point a few moments later, the teacher takes it up with interest.

What is taught in law school is as much a problem as the way it is taught. A recent survey revealed that in the seven most widely used casebooks, domestic violence is barely discussed and rape is presented as an exercise in the manufacture of defenses. The 1985 edition of one of the most widely used criminal law casebooks omits rape altogether. Although family law cases dealing with divorce, alimony, child support, and the enforcement of support awards are the leading category of cases on almost every state's civil docket and a major factor in the growing impoverishment of women and the children in their custody, some schools do not even offer a class in family law.

Women law faculty members are still few and unevenly distributed. At the schools with a substantial number of women faculty members, such as Brooklyn Law School, women students are active participants in class and feel well integrated into the school. Where women faculty members are oddities, women students, too, feel like outsiders.

These issues of women students' dissatisfaction, the failure to include women's perspectives and concerns in casebooks and class discussions, and the recruitment of more women faculty members are gaining increased attention. By the time you reach law school, they may be to some extent ameliorated. But they will not have vanished, and you should be prepared to deal with them. Involving yourself in or creating an organization focused on the entire spectrum of "women's issues"-an organization that should include men-is one way to seek change from an institutional base rather than go it alone.

Although to date those who have written about their disenchantment with law school's abstraction and devaluation of individual experience have been women, this is an issue for men as well. Now retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, in a 1987 speech to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York entitled "Reason, Passion and the 'Progress of the Law,"' decried the formalist concept of law that supposed there was a mechanical rule for everything just waiting to be discovered. "An appreciation for the dialogue between head and heart is precisely what was missing from the formalist conception of judging. ... In the bureaucratic welfare state of the late twentieth century what we need most acutely is the passion that understands the pulse of life beneath the official version of events."

Men should support serious discussion of "women's issues" in law school classes in order to learn not only how the law is distorted by gender stereotypes, but how these stereotypes constrain the lives of men as well as women. Most important, failure to address these issues undermines both sexes' professional competence. Gender bias in all its forms-stereotypes about the nature and role of women and men, society's perception of the value of women and men and so-called "women's work," and myths and misconceptions about the social and economic realities of women's and men's lives-is pervasive in the application, interpretation, and enforcement of the law and often the law itself.

For example, you are not competent to prosecute a rape case if you know nothing of how the law's and society's image of women as temptresses who consent and then cry rape can prejudice judge and jury. Nor are you competent to secure an equitable divorce settlement for a 50-year-old lifetime homemaker if you know nothing of how society devalues the economic worth of homemaker work and the extreme difficulty women have in obtaining paid employment above minimum wage.

What to Look for in an Employer

Deciding where to work at any point in your career should include consideration of whether the employer considers women and families. Depending on the type of employer, does the firm have women partners, does the prosecutor's office have women bureau chiefs, does the government agency have women in policymaking positions-and are women in these positions in more than token numbers? Does the employer have a written, comprehensive sexual harassment policy with meaningful enforcement provisions?

As more women enter the work force, increasing attention is being given to maternity policies. Some legal employers are highly responsive to these needs. Others are totally resistant. Although the legal profession has always coped with men taking leaves to run for office, to fulfill military reserve obligations, or for other non-family purposes, taking time out for children has been treated as indicating lack of seriousness and dedication to the profession. These attitudes are slowly beginning to change. Some legal employers in both the private and public sectors have seen that offering good family policies is actually a recruitment tool for them because it enables them to attract and retain top women. Many women have found their career with a given employer wrecked because they were forced into ad hoc negotiations and refused any accommodation.

Look for a written family leave policy that allows time off for mothers and fathers for childbirth, adoption, children's illnesses, and the needs of dependent relatives. (Women are usually the caregivers not only for their children, but for their own, and often their husband's, parents.) Look for a written policy with respect to part-time work, flextime and job sharing, and salary proration under these options, and learn how working an alternative schedule affects decisions about partnership and promotion. Find out whether lawyers who actually availed themselves of these policies advanced with their peers or were penalized.