Law Commons^™

Sy-Stem-Ic Bias: An Exploration Of Gender And Race Representation On University Patents, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

People of color and women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (“STEM”) fields in the United States. Through both intentional and unintentional structural barriers, universities continue to lose valuable intellectual resources by perpetuating a lack of gender, racial, and ethnic diversity as people climb the academic ladder. Identifying racial and gender disparities between university campus populations and their patent representation quantifies the qualitatively observed systemic racism and sexism plaguing STEM. Although many have written about racial and gender underrepresentation in STEM, no author has ever endeavored to simultaneously quantify the racial and gender gap at universities in the …

With Liberty And Access For Some: The Aca's Disconnectfor Women's Health, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The ACA denies to women the "basic security" of providing insurance for a procedure that statistics show one in three women will need during their reproductive lifetime. On one hand, the access-enhancing elements of the ACA are likely to help women, who earn lower wages, need more medical care, and live longer than men, to gain access to preventive and regular healthcare and to keep the insurance that they have. On the other hand, poor women and women of color will lose ground in access to abortion, because the ACA prevents insurance payment for abortions through both public and private …

Greensboro And Beyond: Remediating The Structural Sexism In Truth And Reconciliation Processes And Determining The Potential Impact And Benefits Of Truth Processes In The United States, Peggy Maisel

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last 35 years approximately forty truth commissions have investigated human rights violations and abuses in a wide range of countries and communities. Each of these forty commissions provides different lessons on how investigating and testifying about past abuse can lead to healing and change. I have participated in two of the more remarkable Truth and Reconciliation processes, the first as an observer, the other as an advisor. The former is perhaps the most widely known and discussed TRC process, the one which took place in South Africa from 1996 to 1998 that examined the entire apartheid era in …

Women's Place: Urban Planning, Housing Design, And Work-Family Balance, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade a substantial literature has emerged analyzing the role of work-family conflict in hampering women's economic, social, and civil equality. Many of the issues we routinely discuss as work family balance problems have distinct spatial dimensions. 'Place' is by no means the main factor in work-family balance difficulties, but amongst work-family policy-makers it is perhaps the least appreciated. This article examines the role of urban planning and housing design in frustrating the effective balance of work and family responsibilities. Nothing in the literature on work-family balance reform addresses this aspect of the problem. That literature focuses instead …

Testing Poor Pregnant Women For Cocaine: Physicians As Police Investigators, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1989, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall surmised that “declaring a war on illegal drugs is good public policy . . . [but] the first, and worst, casualty of war will be the precious liberties of our citizens.” The same year, in the midst of President George Bush's “war on drugs,” the Medical University of South Carolina initiated a program to screen selected pregnant patients for cocaine and to provide positive test results to the police. At a time of high public concern about “cocaine babies,” this program seemed reasonable to the university and local public officials. Drug-screening programs in …

Grounded Applications: Feminism And Law At The Millennium, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

The conference topic is feminism in the twenty-first century, a dialogue between academics and practicing attorneys. The first order of business will be to resist the millennium invitation to come up with evermore novel, overarching formulations of the mission and means of feminism. At the end of the twentieth century we know quite a bit about the problems presented by feminists and the problems within feminism. We have had a long history of insightful intellectual discourse on questions of equality and on the meaning of gender. We also know that it takes time to absorb and apply broad insights in …

The Polygamous Heart?, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Workers, particularly women, are increasingly vocal about the poverty of family time that their jobs allow them. But what if a company responded by offering family-friendly policies that would reduce work hours, like job-sharing and parttime work, and no one signed up for them? What if instead workers signed up for “familyfriendly” services like long-hour on-site daycare that made it easier to stay at work longer? Sociologist Arlie Hochschild seeks to explain this puzzle in The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home s Home Becomes Work. She portrays the modern workplace as carefully engineered to be friendly, relaxed, supportive, appreciative …

Women And Children First, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In the lore of the sea there are few events that have so exemplified heroism and self-sacrifice as the acts of the soldiers and sailors of the British ship Birkenhead when it sank in 1852. The soldiers of the 74th Highland Regiment stood at attention on deck (with the band playing) “while the women and children were saved and the captain very properly went down with his ship.” More than 450 lives were lost, and the phrase “women and children first” was introduced into the language as part of the “Birkenhead drill.” As Kipling put it in his poem …

Fetal Protection And Employment Discrimination - The Johnson Controls Case, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Employers have historically limited women's access to traditionally male, high-paying jobs. In one famous case early in this century, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Oregon law that forbade hiring women for jobs that required more than 10 hours of work a day in factories. The Chief Justice explained that this restriction was reasonable because "healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring" and preserving the physical well-being of women helps "preserve the strength and vigor of the race." This rationale was never particularly persuasive, and women's hours have not been limited in traditionally female, low-paid fields of employment, such as …

Parental Leaves And Poor Women: Paying The Price For Time Off, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents a critique of unpaid "parental" leaves and the parental leave legislation recently passed by Congress.1 Eight states have already enacted parental leave statutes of various kinds.' For the sake of simplicity and uniformity, however, this Article focuses on the proposed federal legislation3 and its anticipated effects on unemployed and underemployed women.4 Specifically, this Article argues that the debate about parental leave 5 has ignored the possibility that the cost of this mandated benefit is likely to be borne by poor, low-skill working women6 who will find that their job opportunities narrow as employers try to shift some …

Protecting The Liberty Of Pregnant Patients, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

We are seeing the beginning of an alliance between physicians and the state to force pregnant women to follow medical advice for the sake of their fetuses. No irreversible commitments to such an alliance have yet been made, but only a principled discussion of the issues is likely to prevent forced treatment from becoming standard medical practice.

In her futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood envisions a world in which physicians and the state combine to strip fertile women of all human rights. These women come to view themselves as "two-legged wombs, that's all; sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices." …