Why does being a woman/transgender/gay not count as URM? Forum

[20141023]

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[A. Nony Mouse]

Also, I like the golf tournament idea. But how about instead of golf, it's a bake-off?

Allez cuisine!

Yes, yes, exactly!

[lawschool22]

(The same people who say women are less aggressive/competitive than men seem pretty ready to believe that women are always competing with each other....

Those who say women are less competitive and aggressive are wrong. Goal oriented, hard to say. Women competing against each other… gawd, they nailed that one.

Yeah, women competing against each-other is in a entirely different ballpark than is women competing against men, IMO. This certainly is not uniformly true because, as I've stated, there is a lot of variability in all of this. But that's a really moot point I may say. Let's just think about this for one moment. What group of people mercilessly have been fighting wars for hundreds of centuries? (Oh I forgot about the prehistoric barriers women faced from their husbands making them stay home with their children while they hunted, oops).
What group of people gives birth to babies and are the first ones to interact with them?
Women gain a mutual love for their babies through the process of pregnancy. To say that there isn't this natural attraction towards the offspring of women's children is just absurd. Let's stop treating women's uterus' like they're just a holding cell for premature babies and respect the institution of birth for just one second. I know, it's really hard to do this when we have abortion doctors killing living babies and when Obama votes down a bill in Chicago to provide life services to botched aborted babies.

I mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist or even 'objective' clear cut studies to demonstrate this. Just try to observe with objectivity human beings and stop trying to slap the victim status to every group of society that is not equally represented in something you deem should be equally represented.

Anyway, My question is, where is your proof that the only difference between men and women are their sexual organs? What about breasts, hip size, buttocks, etc. I've provided studies that demonstrate certain differences between the effects of testosterone vs. the effects of estrogen and how they effect the social development of children. These hormones go beyond just their sexual functions, and is demonstrated well. Let's just face it, testosterone provides drive/aggression. That is why men perform exponentially better at sports. That is why women don't play sports with men. Their are physical capacities that accompany mental states that men have more so than women.

Just because you don't find a certain segment of a population represented evenly in a given institution, doesn't mean that there are institutional/discriminatory barriers. There are exponentially more blacks playing basketball, more women doing ballet, etc. Moreover, the numbers represented in an employer's place of business does not reflect that employer's policy and or bias.

Oh boy. I have no words. But I do want to point out you used the wrong "effect" the third time

[Captainunaccountable]

(The same people who say women are less aggressive/competitive than men seem pretty ready to believe that women are always competing with each other....

Those who say women are less competitive and aggressive are wrong. Goal oriented, hard to say. Women competing against each other… gawd, they nailed that one.

Yeah, women competing against each-other is in a entirely different ballpark than is women competing against men, IMO. This certainly is not uniformly true because, as I've stated, there is a lot of variability in all of this. But that's a really moot point I may say. Let's just think about this for one moment. What group of people mercilessly have been fighting wars for hundreds of centuries? (Oh I forgot about the prehistoric barriers women faced from their husbands making them stay home with their children while they hunted, oops).
What group of people gives birth to babies and are the first ones to interact with them?
Women gain a mutual love for their babies through the process of pregnancy. To say that there isn't this natural attraction towards the offspring of women's children is just absurd. Let's stop treating women's uterus' like they're just a holding cell for premature babies and respect the institution of birth for just one second. I know, it's really hard to do this when we have abortion doctors killing living babies and when Obama votes down a bill in Chicago to provide life services to botched aborted babies.

I mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist or even 'objective' clear cut studies to demonstrate this. Just try to observe with objectivity human beings and stop trying to slap the victim status to every group of society that is not equally represented in something you deem should be equally represented.

Anyway, My question is, where is your proof that the only difference between men and women are their sexual organs? What about breasts, hip size, buttocks, etc. I've provided studies that demonstrate certain differences between the effects of testosterone vs. the effects of estrogen and how they effect the social development of children. These hormones go beyond just their sexual functions, and is demonstrated well. Let's just face it, testosterone provides drive/aggression. That is why men perform exponentially better at sports. That is why women don't play sports with men. Their are physical capacities that accompany mental states that men have more so than women.

Just because you don't find a certain segment of a population represented evenly in a given institution, doesn't mean that there are institutional/discriminatory barriers. There are exponentially more blacks playing basketball, more women doing ballet, etc. Moreover, the numbers represented in an employer's place of business does not reflect that employer's policy and or bias.

Oh boy. I have no words. But I do want to point out you used the wrong "effect" the third time

What's wrong with what I said? Granted, I didn't really put that much thought into it.

[sasquatchsam]

I'm not being emotional, I'm just disagreeing with you. (sasquatchsam, not sidhesadie)

And honestly, I'm quite prepared to write off the suggestion that men have more of the characteristics required to be a biglaw attorney than women do, since again, last time I checked, being a biglaw lawyer did not involve using one's genitalia. Beyond that, no one (here, at least) has comprehensively explained 1) what exact specific, concrete, objective characteristics are required to become a biglaw partner, 2) the specific, concrete, objective non-biological differences between men and women, and 3) how the former is connected to the latter (objectively, I mean - not how people perceive men's and women's actions differently, and not the structural barriers to success created by expectations about childrearing and so on; just literally what objective characteristics men possess that make them better suited for the job).

While we're at it, I'd love some objective evidence that men are more aggressive, competitive, or goal-oriented than women. (The same people who say women are less aggressive/competitive than men seem pretty ready to believe that women are always competing with each other over, say, sexual partners, looks, parenting, and the like.)

Sorry I didn't mean to accuse anyone of being emotional...it was a preemptive strike against anyone getting their feelings hurt. It was simply meant as a reminder that discussions that are important in our culture often get resolved by name calling and accusations rather than through discourse and objective argumentation. I certainly don't know if women or men on average have a better chance of being blessed with the characteristics of a biglaw partner.

I think we are approaching the same problem from two different directions. We want biglaw partnership hiring to be based on the skill and ability of the applicant and not on their sex. Determining the nature and extent of the discrimination is a necessary step in formulating any type of solution. To that end, I would like to know if the characteristics that are advantageous in becoming a biglaw partner are more common in one of the sexes or if there is any difference at all. I simply don't think we should say that there is no difference before we are able to look at any objective data.

I certainly didn't mean to say anything offensive and am truly interested in this issue and finding a workable solution. I am not sure if that can happen here or not but without discussions like this I doubt it will ever happen. This thread has certainly drifted close to turning into a "you're stupid" "well you're an idiot!" type of argument but I think it can still be a useful place to discuss ideas and work on a difficult problem.

[SemperLegal]

Yeah, women competing against each-other is in a entirely different ballpark than is women competing against men, IMO. This certainly is not uniformly true because, as I've stated, there is a lot of variability in all of this. But that's a really moot point I may say. Let's just think about this for one moment. What group of people mercilessly have been fighting wars for hundreds of centuries? (Oh I forgot about the prehistoric barriers women faced from their husbands making them stay home with their children while they hunted, oops).

As someone who has actually fought it a few wars, let me tell you that being a warrior has a lot less to do with competition and aggression than it does with cooperation and sentimentality, else we would just kill our commander's and live like kings overseas.

What group of people gives birth to babies and are the first ones to interact with them?
Women gain a mutual love for their babies through the process of pregnancy. To say that there isn't this natural attraction towards the offspring of women's children is just absurd. Let's stop treating women's uterus' like they're just a holding cell for premature babies and respect the institution of birth for just one second.

The fact that women have an instinctual connection to there own children based on hormonal reasons not only doesn't explain the connection to offspring after the first few weeks, but also leads no support to the idea that women are as a whole more emotionally intuitive or less aggressive. In fact, it proves the opposite, since mother's seem to be willing to disregard the interests and feelings of other in order to advantage their own children. If you really think that mother's (or women in general) have a timeless love for all babies, then you really need to get out more and see parents interact with other parents

I know, it's really hard to do this when we have abortion doctors killing living babies and when Obama votes down a bill in Chicago to provide life services to botched aborted babies.

What?

I mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist or even 'objective' clear cut studies to demonstrate this. Just try to observe with objectivity human beings and stop trying to slap the victim status to every group of society that is not equally represented in something you deem should be equally represented.

Recognizing that the system is neither as fair or as efficient as it could be, does not mean that the decks have suddenly been stacked against the people in the more powerful position. Calm down, no one is saying that you didn't earn what you have, just that merit is not always sufficient.

Anyway, My question is, where is your proof that the only difference between men and women are their sexual organs? What about breasts, hip size, buttocks, etc. I've provided studies that demonstrate certain differences between the effects of testosterone vs. the effects of estrogen and how they effect the social development of children. These hormones go beyond just their sexual functions, and is demonstrated well. Let's just face it, testosterone provides drive/aggression. That is why men perform exponentially better at sports. That is why women don't play sports with men. Their are physical capacities that accompany mental states that men have more so than women.

There are some things that men and women can't compete it at a large scale. These include sports and combat. There are somethings were physical capacity has zero effect and therefore there should not be such a huge disparity.

And just for the record, there is no need for lawyers to big or aggressive, its literally the most beta of all the professions.

Just because you don't find a certain segment of a population represented evenly in a given institution, doesn't mean that there are institutional/discriminatory barriers. There are exponentially more blacks playing basketball, more women doing ballet, etc. Moreover, the numbers represented in an employer's place of business does not reflect that employer's policy and or bias.

What's more likely, that a industry of mostly paper-pushing requires testosterone? Or that a system where there wasn't a single female Justice for 100 years still holds a bias?

[Captainunaccountable]

OK. Sorry guys, despite common sense telling me to stop I urge to counter all these things I've felt vehemently opposed to. Excuse my abruptness and persistence (and ignorance if you say). Good day (And for the record, I have nothing against female attorneys or females in ANY sense, I love girls).

[Kimikho]

OK. Sorry guys, despite common sense telling me to stop I urge to counter all these things I've felt vehemently opposed to. Excuse my abruptness and persistence (and ignorance if you say). Good day (And for the record, I have nothing against female attorneys or females in ANY sense, I love girls).

ITT: "I can't be racist, I have tons of black friends!"

yes, I always assume that someone who opposes life-saving procedures for women "loves girls."

[xRON MEXiCOx]

This thread has gotten off-topic. Lock it up.

[TheMostDangerousLG]

OK. Sorry guys, despite common sense telling me to stop I urge to counter all these things I've felt vehemently opposed to. Excuse my abruptness and persistence (and ignorance if you say). Good day (And for the record, I have nothing against female attorneys or females in ANY sense, I love girls).

ITT: "I can't be racist, I have tons of black friends!"

yes, I always assume that someone who opposes life-saving procedures for women "loves girls."

I assume anyone who shows their respect for females by asserting the fact that they're straight and by referring to women as "girls" really is a giant fucking troll means it.

[Lwoods]

5 of the 51 BigLaw firms who announced new partners at the beginning of this year promoted 0 women. Overall, women comprised only 30.6% of those promoted to partner in the latest announcement by those 51 firms.
http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202637372423#


Anyway, to answer whomever asked me about the OP earlier--no, women are not URM for law school admissions because we're not underrepresented in law schools, at least not to a statistically significant extent. I doubt GLB students are underrepresented either, though sexual identity does lend itself well to a diversity statement. Transgendered, though, hard to say. I guess it's harder to know who identifies as such. Again, worth a diversity statement, but probably not underrepresented in general.

One reason why we keep going back to law firm partnerships is because implicit bias will continue to perpetuate if current law students and young associates fail to take notice and be proactive. Young female associates may not realize they're missing out on client development unless they know to take notice. Male partners may simply be hesitant to mentor female associates because they're afraid of how it might look. So it's good for us to be aware, to anticipate these roadblocks, and to be prepared to do more than our male counterparts in order to achieve more equal results.

[patogordo]

What's more likely, that a industry of mostly paper-pushing requires testosterone? Or that a system where there wasn't a single female Justice for 100 years still holds a bias?

Occam's Oppressive Razor

[lawschool22]

5 of the 51 BigLaw firms who announced new partners at the beginning of this year promoted 0 women. Overall, women comprised only 30.6% of those promoted to partner in the latest announcement by those 51 firms.
http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202637372423#.

While there is still a ways to go, I would honestly view 31% female partner admission this year as a sign of progress. When you consider that law school graduates are approximately 45% female, this suggests the gap of graduates vs. partnership makeup is shrinking compared to what it has been over the history of the modern legal profession.

[SemperLegal]

5 of the 51 BigLaw firms who announced new partners at the beginning of this year promoted 0 women. Overall, women comprised only 30.6% of those promoted to partner in the latest announcement by those 51 firms.
http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202637372423#.

While there is still a ways to go, I would honestly view 31% female partner admission this year as a sign of progress. When you consider that law school graduates are approximately 45% female, this suggests the gap of graduates vs. partnership makeup is shrinking compared to what it has been over the history of the modern legal profession.

It is certainly progress from the days of 1-2% female partners, but the fact of the matter is that this years crop of partners graduated law school 8-12 years ago, when law schools were graduating 47-49% female classes (http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/ ... eckdam.pdf).

Its true that we can really only address some of the institutional biases when they occur (i.e. it was hard to gain data an factors that disproportionately drove out female associates before issues that prevented women from being hired were overcome, and it was hard to fix those problems until women starting graduating law school in large numbers). However, they really should be dong better by now.

[lawschool22]

5 of the 51 BigLaw firms who announced new partners at the beginning of this year promoted 0 women. Overall, women comprised only 30.6% of those promoted to partner in the latest announcement by those 51 firms.
http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202637372423#.

While there is still a ways to go, I would honestly view 31% female partner admission this year as a sign of progress. When you consider that law school graduates are approximately 45% female, this suggests the gap of graduates vs. partnership makeup is shrinking compared to what it has been over the history of the modern legal profession.

It is certainly progress from the days of 1-2% female partners, but the fact of the matter is that this years crop of partners graduated law school 8-12 years ago, when law schools were graduating 47-49% female classes (http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/ ... eckdam.pdf).

Its true that we can really only address some of the institutional biases when they occur (i.e. it was hard to gain data an factors that disproportionately drove out female associates before issues that prevented women from being hired were overcome, and it was hard to fix those problems until women starting graduating law school in large numbers). However, they really should be dong better by now.

I'm certainly not saying there is not a disparity. I'm just saying we seem to be at least moving in the right direction. We have no idea whether the rate of change is slow or whether we're actually moving things along "faster" than people perhaps otherwise thought was possible; there's nothing to compare it to. I'm sure if you asked male and female lawyers 30 years ago if or when they thought we would see a day with 31% female partners being admitted, they would have said it was decades upon decades away. Of course faster is better, but the fact remains that we are moving in the right direction, and for that we should be at least somewhat happy.

[ScottRiqui]

Any way to estimate what percentage of the associates being considered for partner were female?

[20141023]

.

[stillwater]

i did hear though that luck be a lady. so there's that

[20141023]

.

[lawschool22]

Actually, all of the stats you all stated are slightly off from what we should be looking at. The 45% was correct, but it isn't the number of law school graduates who are female (which is closer to 47%). The 45% is the percentage of females entering law firms as associates. This needs to be used as the baseline because using 47-49% will make the gap between associates/partners seem slightly bigger than it actually is.

What would be great to have, as ScottRiqui hinted at, is the ratio of "partner-track" women who are still at law firms versus the ratio of those women who are actually promoted to partner. Unfortunately, just like law school employment (we know the actual outcomes instead of the desired outcomes of graduates), it is very difficult to get this data because firms and law schools don't like to release this kind of information.

Your point is taken on matriculates vs. graduates, although the differences of a couple percentage points probably aren't too significant as it relates to the larger argument.

The ratio of "partner-track" women vs. those who are promoted would be a useful metric, but we want to be cautious, as it wouldn't tell us the whole story. It would be useful in the sense that we could see how much of the problem relates to the actual partnership admission process. For instance if 45% of associates in the partner track were women, yet we only say 31% get admitted, then a large piece of the disparity would be due to the partner admission process. However if the two percentages were close to identical, we would then want to look at the gap between graduates and partnership admits.

A large part of the argument is that many women never "make it" to being in the partnership track due to other societal factors at play. So while it would be interesting to look at this number, we would want to be careful to not conclude there was no sexism, if in fact the two percentages turned out to be close.

[Kimikho]

Are there any KNOWN ad-comm TLS accounts/ TLS mods/lurkers? If so, who?

[koalacity]

(The same people who say women are less aggressive/competitive than men seem pretty ready to believe that women are always competing with each other....

Those who say women are less competitive and aggressive are wrong. Goal oriented, hard to say. Women competing against each other… gawd, they nailed that one.

Yeah, women competing against each-other is in a entirely different ballpark than is women competing against men, IMO. This certainly is not uniformly true because, as I've stated, there is a lot of variability in all of this. But that's a really moot point I may say. Let's just think about this for one moment. What group of people mercilessly have been fighting wars for hundreds of centuries? (Oh I forgot about the prehistoric barriers women faced from their husbands making them stay home with their children while they hunted, oops).
What group of people gives birth to babies and are the first ones to interact with them?
Women gain a mutual love for their babies through the process of pregnancy. To say that there isn't this natural attraction towards the offspring of women's children is just absurd. Let's stop treating women's uterus' like they're just a holding cell for premature babies and respect the institution of birth for just one second. I know, it's really hard to do this when we have abortion doctors killing living babies and when Obama votes down a bill in Chicago to provide life services to botched aborted babies.

I mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist or even 'objective' clear cut studies to demonstrate this. Just try to observe with objectivity human beings and stop trying to slap the victim status to every group of society that is not equally represented in something you deem should be equally represented.

Anyway, My question is, where is your proof that the only difference between men and women are their sexual organs? What about breasts, hip size, buttocks, etc. I've provided studies that demonstrate certain differences between the effects of testosterone vs. the effects of estrogen and how they effect the social development of children. These hormones go beyond just their sexual functions, and is demonstrated well. Let's just face it, testosterone provides drive/aggression. That is why men perform exponentially better at sports. That is why women don't play sports with men. Their are physical capacities that accompany mental states that men have more so than women.

Just because you don't find a certain segment of a population represented evenly in a given institution, doesn't mean that there are institutional/discriminatory barriers. There are exponentially more blacks playing basketball, more women doing ballet, etc. Moreover, the numbers represented in an employer's place of business does not reflect that employer's policy and or bias.

I have no idea how to reconcile this post with the fact that you apparently are minoring in Women and Gender Studies.

This ranks up there with andre douglas pond cummings' two alma maters being BYU and Howard in terms of shocking incongruity.

[lawschool22]

Stealth delete.