Law Commons^™

Gender, Race, And Job Satisfaction Of Law Graduates, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Studies typically find that lawyers have high job satisfaction and that women are not less satisfied than are men. But racial differences as well as gender differences by race or ethnicity in satisfaction may be masked because most lawyers identify as racially White. To examine whether job satisfaction differs by race and whether gender and race/ethnicity have an intersectional relation to job satisfaction, I use data on nearly 13,000 law graduates drawn from six waves of the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) conducted between 2003 and 2019. The NSCG uniquely provides a large enough sample to examine intersectionality in …

Miscarriage Of Justice: Early Pregnancy Loss And The Limits Of U.S. Employment Law, Laura T. Kessler

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores judicial responses to miscarriage under federal employment law in the United States. Miscarriage is an incredibly common experience. Of confirmed pregnancies, about fifteen percent will end in miscarriage; almost half of all women who have given birth have suffered a miscarriage. Yet this experience slips through the cracks of every major federal employment law in the United States.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, for example, defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 requires covered employers to provide employees with …

The Intersectional Race And Gender Effects Of The Pandemic In Legal Academia, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic helped to expose the inequities that already existed between students at every level of education based on race and socioeconomic class status, it has exposed existing inequities among faculty based on gender and the intersection of gender and race. The legal academy has been no exception to this reality. The widespread loss of childcare and the closing of both public and private primary and secondary schools have disproportionately harmed women law faculty, who are more likely than their male peers to work a “second shift” in terms of childcare and household responsibilities. Similarly, women law …

Maximizing #Metoo: Intersectionality & The Movement, Jamillah Bowman Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although women of color experience high rates of harassment and assault, the #MeToo movement has largely left them on the margins in terms of (1) the online conversation, (2) the traditional social movement activity occurring offline, and (3) the consequential legal activity. This Article analyzes how race shapes experiences of harassment and how seemingly positive legal strides continue to fail women of color thirty years beyond Kimberlé Crenshaw’s initial framing of intersectionality theory. I discuss the weaknesses of the reform efforts and argue for more tailored strategies that take into account the ineffectiveness of our current Title VII framework and, …

Disclosing Discrimination, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the United States, enforcement of laws prohibiting workplace discrimination rests almost entirely on the shoulders of employee victims, who must first file charges with a government agency and then pursue litigation themselves. While the law forbids retaliation against employees who complain, this does little to prevent it, in part because employees are also responsible for initiating any claims of retaliation they experience as a result of their original discrimination claims. The burden on employees to complain—and their justified fear of retaliation if they do so—results in underenforcement of the law and a failure to spot and redress underlying structural …

The Politics Of Pregnancy Accommodation, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

How can antidiscrimination law treat men and women “equally” when it comes to the issue of pregnancy? The development of U.S. law on pregnancy accommodation in the workplace tells a story of both legal disagreements about the meaning of “equality” and political disagreements about how best to achieve “equality” at work for women. Federal law has prohibited sex discrimination in the workplace for over five decades. Yet, due to long held gender stereotypes separating work and motherhood, the idea that prohibiting sex discrimination requires a duty to accommodate pregnant workers is a relatively recent phenomenon—and still only partially required by …

Dehumanization 'Because Of Sex': The Multiaxial Approach To The Title Vii Rights Of Sexual Minorities, Shirley Lin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Although Title VII prohibits discrimination against any employee “because of such individual’s . . . sex,” legal commentators have not yet accurately appraised Title VII’s trait and causation requirements embodied in that phrase. Since 2015, most courts assessing the sex discrimination claims of LGBT employees began to intentionally analyze “sex” as a trait using social-construction evidence, and evaluated separately whether the discriminatory motive caused the workplace harm. Responding to what this Article terms a “doctrinal correction” to causation within this groundswell of decisions, the Supreme Court recently issued an “expansive” and “sweeping” reformulation of but-for causation in Bostock v. Clayton …

Discrimination By Design?, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

Platform world is speeding the redesign of employment. Bricks-and-mortar firms once hired through narrow portals and then invested in the workers they hired, providing job security and predictable career ladders. Platform world flings the doors wide open to income-generating efforts, providing new opportunities but also offering security and predictable advancement to almost no one.

Other legal scholars have mined these same data for gender disparities; they have found disparities in the platform economy arising from customer biases and individual preferences, and manifested in men’s and women’s different experiences in everything from pricing plumbing services to fraud prevention. Neutral-appearing algorithms may …

Female Entrepreneurs And Equity Crowdfunding In The Us: Receiving Less When Asking For More, Seth C. Oranburg, Mark Geiger

Law Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we explore the relationship between gender and funding raised through equity crowdfunding. Using data collected from the population of US equity crowdfunding campaigns, we find that campaigns receive significantly less funding when the primary signatory is female. Furthermore, we explore interactions between gender and a campaign's funding target. The results suggest that campaigns raise significantly less funding, as the target amount increases, when the primary signatory is female. These results are the first to suggest a relationship between gender and funding among the population of US equity crowdfunding campaigns. Implications and future directions are discussed.

The Grand Maple Dream: Fulfilled, Fading Or Failed?: Filipino Women Nurses In Manitoba And Their Struggles Against Harassment And Discrimination, Emily Sanchez Salcedo

Center for Business Research and Development

The Philippines is a tiny archipelago in Southeast Asia with over one hundred million people wallowing in a third world economy kept afloat for decades by Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW). In 2017, OFWs collectively sent home cash remittances amounting over $28 billion—roughly $645 million came from Filipinos in Canada. This amount is the eleventh biggest contributor to the Philippine economy (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, 2018).

On the other hand, the Philippines has become the top country for new immigrants to Canada in recent years, surpassing India and China (Friesen, 2018). According to the 2016 Census of Population Program, there are …

Feminism And The Tournament, Jessica A. Clarke

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Naomi Bishop, the protagonist of the 2016 film "Equity," is the rare "she-wolf of Wall Street."' At the beginning of the film, Bishop appears on a panel at an alumni event. She explains her career choices to the young women in the audience as follows: I like money. I do. I like numbers. I like negotiating. I love a challenge. Turning a no into a yes. But I really do like money. I like knowing that I have it. I grew up in a house where there was never enough. I was raised by a single mom with four kids. …

Comparing The Effects Of Judges' Gender And Arbitrators' Gender In Sex Discrimination Cases And Why It Matters, Pat K. Chew

Articles

Empirical research substantiates that the judges’ gender makes a difference in sex discrimination and sexual harassment court cases. The author’s study of arbitration of sex discrimination cases administered by the American Arbitration Association between 2010 and 2014, however, finds that this judges’ “gender effect” does not occur. Namely, there is no significant difference in the decision-making patterns of female and male arbitrators as indicated by case outcomes.

The author proposes that characteristics of arbitrators, the arbitration process, and arbitration cases all combine to help explain the gender effect differences. Further, she suggests that this analysis reveals concerns about the arbitration …

En-Gendering Economic Inequality, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

We live in an era of growing economic inequality. Luminaries ranging from the President to the Pope to economist Thomas Piketty in his bestselling book Capital in the Twenty- First Century have raised alarms about the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Overlooked, however, in these important discussions is the reality that economic inequality is not a uniform experience; rather, its effects fall more harshly on women and minorities. With regard to gender, American women have higher rates of poverty and get paid less than comparable men, and their workplace participation rates are falling. Yet economic inequality is neither …

Nurturing Wings Or Clipping Them Off: The Philippine Approach To Female Labor Migration And A Potentially Redeeming Role For The Commission On Human Rights, Emily Sanchez Salcedo

Center for Business Research and Development

The large-scale migration of Filipino workers started in the 1970’s as inadequate local employment and livelihood opportunities pointed to overseas opportunities in the booming economy of oil-rich countries in the Middle East. Though initially dominated by male construction workers and seafarers, female migrant workers, mostly in the health care professions, in domestic services and in the entertainment industry, followed suit and, in the most recent available statistical report, have even slightly outnumbered the men. As of the end of 2014, 50.43% of the 2.32 million overseas Filipino workers are women. Collectively, these overseas workers sent about 27 billion dollars in …

Lifetime Disadvantage, Susan Bisom-Rapp, Malcolm Sargeant

Faculty Scholarship

Lifetime Disadvantage, Discrimination and the Gendered Workforce fills a gap in the literature on discrimination and disadvantage suffered by women at work by focusing on the inadequacies of the current law and the need for a new holistic approach. Each stage of the working life cycle for women is examined with a critical consideration of how the law attempts to address the problems that inhibit women's labor force participation. By using their model of lifetime disadvantage, the authors show how the law adopts an incremental and disjointed approach to resolving the challenges, and argue that a more holistic orientation towards …

Centering The Teenage "Siren": Adolescent Workers, Sexual Harassment, And The Legal Construction Of Race And Gender, Anastasia M. Boles

Faculty Scholarship

Recent scholarship and media attention has focused on the prevalence of sexually harassing behavior directed at working teenagers, and the emergence of sexual harassment lawsuits by these minors against their employers. Although many of the legal issues concerning workplace sexual harassment and adult workers (and the various state and federal jurisprudence prohibiting it) have been widely discussed, there is surprisingly little discourse, research, and precedent addressing the problem of workplace sexual harassment and teen workers.

Currently, most sexual harassment cases brought by adolescent workers are litigated using the doctrinal framework for adult workers. Only the Seventh Circuit has developed an …

Reconsidering Legal Regulation Of Race, Sex, And Sexual Orientation, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Work Wives, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

Traditional notions of male and female roles remain tenacious at home and work even in the face of gender-neutral family laws and robust employment discrimination laws. This Article analyzes the challenge of gender tenacity through the lens of the “work wife.” The continued use of the marriage metaphor at work reveals that the dynamics of marriage flow between home and work, creating a feedback loop that inserts gender into both domains in multiple ways. This phenomenon may reinforce gender stereotypes, hindering the potential of law to achieve gender equality. But such gender tenacity need not always lead to subordination. The …

A Dilemma Of Doctrinal Design: Rights, Identity And The Work-Family Conflict, Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This symposium article suggests that with regard to the work-family conflict, we may have exhausted doctrine’s potential in setting a constitutional foundation for women to be treated as equals in the workplace and requiring that they not be discriminated against in the event that they decide to start a family. For purposes of this piece, those accomplishments constitute the first phase or “first generation” of progress. This article is concerned with how doctrine relates to “second generation” issues arising from the work-family conflict: how to balance work and family once some initial level of equality has been achieved; how to …

Masculinity, Labor, And Sexual Power, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This Essay focuses on gender and sexuality to analyze Hannah Rosin's thesis in the The End of Men. It relies in large part on feminist and masculinities theories to consider how men and women may both suffer gendered disadvantage. It looks specifically at Las Vegas, a market that is sexualized, in order to complicate Rosin's narrative, and to create a better understanding of what is happening in the U.S. workforce. While the Las Vegas market is not representative of markets across the country, it is economically and socially significant and, with the expansion of the casino and gaming industries …

Masculine Law Firms, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This article describes the masculine culture in law firms and analyzes how this culture harms both men and women because of their gender. Part II explains MMT, and analyzes the masculine practices that exist in modern law firms. Part III studies a lawsuit brought by a law firm associate, a white male father of two who allegedly was fired in retaliation for taking leave under the Family Medical Leave Act and because of his failure to adhere to the macho stereotypes prevalent in the law firm. Part IV analyzes how the law should respond to masculine norms, and suggests that …

Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression has emerged as a major focus of civil rights reform. Opponents of these reforms have structured their opposition around one dominant image: the bathroom. With striking consistency, opponents have invoked anxiety over the bathroom -- who uses bathrooms, what happens in bathrooms, and what traumas one might experience while occupying a bathroom -- as the reason to permit discrimination in the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. This rhetoric of the bathroom in the debate over gender-identity protections seeks to exploit an underlying anxiety that has played a role in …

Work, Caregiving, And Masculinities, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

In her book Reshaping the Work-Family Debate, Joan Williams demonstrates the vulnerability of parent workers in working class America. In Chapter 2, "One Sick Child Away from Being Fired," she examines the records of ninety-nine union arbitrations to analyze the problems of working class parents who struggle to juggle their working and parenting responsibilities. Because this chapter is a tour de force in an overall excellent book, and because it suggests an area that Professor McGinley's research has focused on over the past number of years, in this Essay, Professor McGinley limits her discussion almost exclusively to this chapter. …

Mancession Or Momcession? Good Providers, A Bad Economy, And Gender Discrimination, Allison Anna Tait

Law Faculty Publications

Against this backdrop of precarious and disappearing work, two new elements became important: who was out of work, and how those still employed were navigating bad jobs. These questions laid the foundation for a flood of stories concerning unemployment and bad employment. Unsurprisingly, gender played a leading role in the debates. This article will discuss these two concerns--employment and workplace discrimination-as they intersect with gender and gender stereotypes.

Do Law Schools Mistreat Women Faculty? Or, Who’S Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, Dan Subotnik

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Working Relationships, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this Essay written for the symposium on "For Love or Money? Defining Relationships in Law and Life," I extend my previous consideration of friendship to the specific context of the workplace, analyzing friendship through the lens of the ties that arise at work instead of those assumed to arise within the home. Many adults spend half or more of their waking hours at work, in the process forming relationships with supervisors, co-workers, subordinates, customers, and other third parties. Although such relationships are at times primarily transactional, at other times they take on intimate qualities similar to those of family …

Race, Sex And Genes At Work: Uncovering The Lessons Of Norman-Bloodsaw, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (“GINA”) is the first federal, uniform protection against the use of genetic information in both the workplace and health insurance. Signed into law on May 21, 2008, GINA prohibits an employer or health insurer from acquiring or using an individual’s genetic information, with some exceptions. One of the goals of GINA is to eradicate actual, or perceived, discrimination based on genetic information in the workplace and in health insurance. Although the threat of genetic discrimination is often discussed in universal terms - as something that could happen to any of us - the …

In Search Of The Reasonable Woman: Anti-Discrimination Rhetoric In The United States, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This article emerged from my participation in a Symposium addressing global perspectives on the topic, "Anti-Discrimination Discourse and Practices," sponsored by The Jean Monnet Chair of European Law at Cagliari University, Sardinia. The article examines the rhetorical development of the "reasonable woman" standard of hostile work environment sexual harassment under Title VII. I argue that the rhetorical framing of the standard has unnecessarily limited its impact, perhaps to the point of undermining its potential to radically revise our understanding of gender discrimination. I suggest how the rhetorical power of the standard might be recovered.

Ricci V. Destefano: A Masculinities Theory Analysis, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This Article applies masculinity theory to explore the aspects Ricci v. Destefano and its political reverberations. Empirical evidence showed that virtually all written tests have a disparate impact on minorities, that a neighboring city had reached less discriminatory results using a different weighting system, and that other fire departments used assessment centers to judge firefighters' qualifications for promotions. While the black male and all female firefighters were made invisible by the case and the testimony, the fact that Ricci's and Vargas' testimony lionized a particularly traditional form of heterosexual masculinity was also invisible. While the command presence required of a …

Reproducing Gender On Law School Faculties, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This article demonstrates that there is a gender divide on law school faculties. Women work in inferior sex-segregated jobs and teach a disproportionate percentage of female-identified courses. More than 80% of law school deans are men. Men teach the more prestigious male-identified courses. Women suffer from differential expectations from colleagues and students and often bear the brunt of their colleagues' bullying behaviors at work. Using masculinities studies and other social science research to identify gendered structures, practices, and behaviors that harm women law professors, this article provides a theoretical framework to explain why women in the legal academy do not …