Hello! I’m 19 year old college student and doing a research project on the Gender bias or struggles women attorneys face in the field, if you’d be willing to answer a few short research questions, that'd be amazing! For clarification, no usernames or any identifying info about the person answering will be used, only your answers and or personal experience you’d care to share.
Have you personally experienced or witnessed any bias or discrimination against you because of your gender?
Have you noticed if clients tend to have more faith in male attorneys when handling a case?
Though the pay gap has shrunk through the years, is it still prevalent and noticeable in this field?
What are struggles you’ve faced with working in a male dominated industry? How have you noticed things changing throughout your career?
Does your Research Ethics Board not require you to include certain information in your post (ex. Purpose of the study, name of your academic institution, anonymization protocols, etc.)? Mine was very strict about this when I was in university.
Not as fair as I’ve been told. It’s for a career research problem statement assignment that we could choose any topic we wanted to research. However I am in a community college right now and this assignment is for a class with a teacher that is about as frustratingly vague as possible with instructions.
I’m not sure whether things differ in community colleges, but typically there is fairly heavy oversight when it comes to academic research with live participants. If you’ve been told to go out and interview people as part of your project, then maybe ethics approval isn’t required in this case. But if you haven’t been explicitly told to interview people, and just to “research,” they may be expecting you to pull information from pre-existing academic sources, like journal articles.
If you’re not sure, it’s probably best to clarify with your professor, as I expect that your assignment will look significantly different depending on which option you go with. Better to clarify with the professor over email or in person rather than work hard on an assignment that completely misses the mark.
Is your professor expecting you to interview people, or research studies?
Just an anecdote - i work with chronic back pain patients When I have advised them to stop wearing heels in a higher than 1 to 1.5 inches I've had two female attorneys tell me that they have to wear high heels to court for anyone to take them seriously. (My feeling was that if they're not being taken seriously it is not their shoes, but...) perhaps that is true?
Please observe the rules:
Whether you are a teacher or a student, this subreddit is for you to ask those burning questions of a teacher. Keep it school appropriate, of course. That said, this is NOT a subreddit for surveys or the like.
The law is not a male dominated industry. What studies did you use to come up with this project?
The ABA would strongly disagree with you, both in terms of general demographics of lawyers and in terms of the demographic of Article III judges and state supreme court judges
41% female lawyers with women outnumbering men most recent years is not a ‘male dominated’ industry.
Nor is there a pay gap - by all means show me a job posting with a female and a male compensation rate.
I’m an older attorney. My bosses have been female across multiple jobs both governmental and private sector. I’ve never seen an all male unit but I have seen all female units.
Given a US population of 200 million working adults, 47% women and 53% men, the odds that a random sample of 1.3 million of them (the number of active attorneys in the US) is 41% women and 59% men is 137 standard deviations away from the expected outcome. The odds of this happening as a result of fair random sampling is roughly 1 in 1040. For context, that would be about the same odds as correctly guessing one specific grain of sand from all the grains of sand on Earth twice in a row.
This is impossibly unlikely to happen by chance. As a result, we can conclude that it is a statistical certainty that the population of attorneys in the US is not a fair, random sampling of men and women.
This doesn’t tell us why there is a definitive non-random bias toward men in the legal profession, but it should resolve any doubt that there is definitely some function selecting men more than women.
We obviously made a number of simplifying assumptions here but I tried to pick values that would make a 60/40 split more likely wherever I noticed a need to make a call. (Rounded population down, rounded portion of female population down, used workforce percentages for the population rather than general population statistics)
You must be a male. Most of the world is a male dominated society, which also includes the industries within it. Are you familiar with the concept of implicit bias?
What I’ve seen is all white female attorney units that push out any minorities and have experienced that twice.
Are you familiar with racial bias?