Read it here. Below is an excerpt:

“… Some of the most important opportunities we have are in two-sided markets: education and employment, contracts and loans, grants and prizes. And the institutions that offer these opportunities operate in an environment where accurate information is hard to come by. One of their main sources of judgment is asking the candidate directly: Tell us why we should admit you. Tell us why we should hire you. Tell us why we should give you a grant. Tell us why we should promote you.

In these circumstances, people who don’t raise their hands don’t get called on, and people who raise their hands timidly get called on less. Some of this is because assertive people get noticed more easily, but some of it is because raising your hand is itself a high-cost signal that you are willing to risk public failure in order to try something.

That in turn correlates with many of the skills the candidate will need to actually do the work — to recruit colleagues and raise money, to motivate participants and convince skeptics, to persevere in the face of both obstacles and ridicule. Institutions assessing the fitness of candidates, in other words, often select self-promoters because self-promotion is tied to other characteristics needed for success.

It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction. … ”

Feminist Law Professors

From the FLP mailbox, this notice of an upcoming conference at the University of Michigan, May 9-11, 2012:

The new University of Michigan Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Policy (SHARP) Center for Women and Girls!  is hosting a national conference to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Title IX, the landmark legislation that has changed the lives of women and girls. The SHARP center is a collaboration between the Women’s Sports Foundation and the University of Michigan.

Please save May 9-11, 2012 and plan to join us at the University of Michigan campus, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Laila Ali will present a keynote lecture at this two and a half day conference featuring nationally renowned researchers, athletes, media experts, and policy makers. The conference will highlight the broad impact of the Title IX legislation on U.S. society. Political, social, historical, economic, and health-related effects will be explored along with an agenda for future research intended to fulfill the promise of Title IX.  Undergraduate and graduate students from across the country will also have opportunities to participate, present, and discuss their research as it relates to the themes of this conference.

For more information on the conference or the new SHARP Center, visit here.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

From the Asia Sentinel, this article:  Do Women in Power Act Differently From Men?  Here an excerpt:

Several studies of women’s involvement in environmental protection cited below seem to indicate that they do – marginally. How that plays itself out across the wider spectrum of politics and business remains to be seen. * * * A series of studies came to these conclusions:

• Countries with higher female parliamentary representation are more likely to set aside protected land areas, according to a 2009 study of 25 developed and 65 developing countries by Colleen Nugent and John M. Shandra, titled State Environmental Protection Efforts, Women’s Status, and World Polity: a Cross-National Analysis. However, why this result came about was not clear.

• Countries with higher female parliamentary representation are more likely to ratify international environmental treaties, according to a study of 130 countries with 92 percent of the world’s people. (Kari Norgaard and John M. York, Gender Equality and State Environmentalism, 2005).

• Of the 49 countries that reduced carbon dioxide emissions between 1990 and 2007, 14 were very high HDI (Human Development Index) countries, 10 of which had higher than average female parliamentary representation.

• But women continue to be underrepresented in national parliaments, on average occupying only 19 percent of seats and accounting for just 18 percent of ministers, according to a study, Women in National Parliaments, by the International Parliamentary Union. Higher positions are even more elusive: only seven of 150 elected heads of state and only 11 of 192 heads of government are women. The situation is similar in local government.

Other evidence suggests that gender empowerment and environmental awareness may be related. The number of women’s and environmental NGOs per capita was negatively correlated with deforestation in a study on 61 countries between 1990 and 2005. That may be partly because of women’s incentives to avert the negative effects of deforestation on their workload, income and health, according to The International Finance Corporation and Forest Loss: A Cross-National Analysis in 2008 by Shandra, Shandra and London.

In developed countries survey data shows that women are more likely than men to engage in environmentally sensitive behaviors, such as recycling, conserving water and avoiding environmentally harmful products (Gallup World Poll data)

But the relationship, far from straightforward, varies with development.

The full article is available here.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

Allison Tait, a Gender Equity and Policy Postdoctoral Associate with the Yale Women Faculty Form has posted a review of Dan Burk’s piece, Do Patents Have Gender?  Dr. Tait writes:

While Burk would like to separate gender realities from gender theory, the two are not so easy to disentangle. The marginalization of women scientists continues to inform the framework of feminist theory. What is interesting, however, is to speculate about the kind of patents we will see when women scientists reach parity and have the luxury of large shops of their own.

Read the rest of Dr. Tait’s post, with comments by Tan Mau Wu, here.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

From The Atlantic:

Last Monday, the 30 companies of Germany’s blue-chip DAX stock index pledged to increase the proportion of women in management positions. That’s news in itself. What’s most interesting, however, is what didn’thappen that day, and what some German politicians openly argue should have happened.

In the U.S., there’s a lot of hemming and hawing about the scarcity of female managers on Wall Street. * * *

Right now in Germany, the talk has pole-vaulted over the personal and the cultural to the legal. What Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen wants, and what she frankly seems pretty frustrated not yet to have gotten, going by her remarks to German television, are legally binding quotas.

Read the rest of the article here.

H/T Marie Newman

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

How difficult would it have been to find women to include in the symposium?  

Symposium. Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Christianity: Perspectives on the Influence of Christianity on Classical Liberal Legal Thought. 33 Campbell L. Rev. 501-694 (2011). [H][L][W]

Lee, Kevin. Introductory remarks. 33 Campbell L. Rev. 501-504 (2011). [H][L][W]

Breen, John M. Religion and the purification of reason: why the liberal state requires more than simple tolerance. 33 Campbell L. Rev. 505-528 (2011). [H][L][W]

Frohnen, Bruce P. Is constitutionalism liberal? 33 Campbell L. Rev. 529-558 (2011). [H][L][W]

Shain, Barry Alan. Liberalism: a religious-dependent faith. 33 Campbell L. Rev. 559-567 (2011). [H][L][W]

Scaperlanda, Michael. Secular not secularist America. 33 Campbell L. Rev. 569-589 (2011). [H][L][W]

Inazu, John D. Between liberalism and theocracy. 33 Campbell L. Rev. 591-607 (2011). [H][L][W]

Pryor, C. Scott. Looking for bedrock: accounting for human rights in classical liberalism, modern secularism, and the Christian tradition. 33 Campbell L. Rev. 609-640 (2011). [H][L][W]

McConnell, Donald R. Is modern liberalism still compatible with free exercise of religion? 33 Campbell L. Rev. 641-660 (2011). [H][L][W]

Baker, Anthony V. “causing the blood to flow where I touched him” liberalism, constitutionalism, Christianity, and the “war” at Covey farm. 33 Campbell L. Rev. 661-683 (2011). [H][L][W]

Cochran, Robert F., Jr. Enlightenment liberalism, lawyers, and the future of lawyer-client relations. 33 Campbell L. Rev. 685-694 (2011). [H][L][W]

Source: SCILP (here).

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

Via Adriana Gardella (here) who conveys an apt critique in less than 140 characters: “Insidious greeting cards re: boys/girls.”

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

Interview by Gina Kolata in the NYT that begins as follows:

Elena Aprile, Joy Hirsch, Mary-Claire King and Tal Rabin are members of a rare breed — women scientists at the top of their fields.

Dr. Aprile, a professor of physics at Columbia University, is searching for dark matter. Dr. Hirsch, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, maps brain processes. Dr. King, a professor of medical genetics at the University of Washington, studies the genetic basis of common complex medical conditions like breast cancer and mental illness. And Dr. Rabin is a cryptography researcher at I.B.M. All four were in New York for the World Science Festival, and were invited to a 30-minute round-table discussion at The New York Times on Wednesday. They talked about their lives as scientists, the joys and struggles of research, and the specific challenges women in science face.

–Ann Bartow

Feminist Law Professors

Boston College Law Review, Issue 52:3 (May 2011)

Articles

Joseph Blocher, Viewpoint Neutrality and Government Speech, 52 B.C. L. Rev. 695 (2011) [PDF]

Robert M. Chesney, Who May Be Held? Military Detention Through the Habeas Lens, 52 B.C. L. Rev. 769 (2011) [PDF]

Thomas A. Lambert, The Roberts Court and the Limits of Antitrust, 52 B.C. L. Rev. 871 (2011) [PDF]

Timothy Zick, The First Amendment in Trans-Border Perspective: Toward a More Cosmopolitan Orientation, 52 B.C. L. Rev. 941 (2011) [PDF]

Aw, man!

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

Yesterday’s post with the good news of Kim Krawiec’s appointment as the Kathrine Robinson Everett Professor at Duke Law School made me wonder about the number of law school chairs that are named after women.

Hey, readers!  We need your help crowd-sourcing a list of all existing chairs that are named after women.  After the fold is the data I have compiled to start.

Please use the comments to add other chairs that you know about, and I’ll periodically update the list.  This is a list of chairs named after women only (as opposed to women and men or “Family of”).  If there are tons more in the other categories, we’ll start other lists, but for now, let’s see how many chairs there are named after women.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors