Question

What current struggles about gender bias in the legal profession might law students engage in and attempt to organize today? If you wanted to start, how might you do so?

Answer 1

• Despite the vast majority of lawyers joining the profession today being female, there is still an enormous pay gap and lack of women at senior levels.The fact is that despite women dominating the numbers at law schools for a generation, the lopsidedness at the top end remains. Nationally women still make up only 10 per cent of senior counsel, despite years of effort to address the imbalance through soft policy approaches.
• A recent landmark study into the reasons women leave the legal profession identified a range of factors, including harassment, bullying and a perception of conscious or unconscious bias against women who adopt flexible working arrangements to balance family responsibilities. Lack of financial security dominated as a key driver of attrition.
  
• Although, women in legal profession no longer face gender discrimination which was faced by them twenty or thirty years back, yet there are several unique issues, based on gender discrimination which they have to face.
• Women lawyers are always judged and compared to their male counterparts. While aggressive women attorneys are judged as harsh and unpleasant, those who are not so aggressive are termed as weak and unfit for this job. They also face certain comments on their physical attributes like height, weight or voice which are considered to convey experience and authority in the profession as well as in our society.
• Female lawyers face more challenges in bringing a balance between their career and their family. Many females state that they encounter the worst kind of gender discrimination in their office or the firms with which they are associated to.