Covering: The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino

Author:Kenji Yoshino
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781588361721
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

SEX-BASED COVERING

The portraits that range the walls of this Yale Law School classroom are, with one exception, of men. They figure honored graduates—judges, professors, and deans. As the seats ripple from the lectern in scalloped tiers that widen as they rise, these portraits hover like a row of backbenchers, whose flushes will never fade, whose hands will never fall. We who reason under their gaze are scraps of unrecorded history.

The seventy people sitting in this classroom tonight are, with few exceptions, women. We are law students, faculty, and staff who have come to a town-hall meeting to discuss the charge that the law school disadvantages women.

In 2001, when this meeting takes place, women have made national headlines for comprising more than half the nation’s entering law-school class. The day the story broke, one of my female students worried aloud the profession would lose prestige if it came to be associated with women.

I think she, at least, should be reassured by these portraits, which testify that men still dominate law’s upper echelons. According to the American Bar Association, women in 2001 made up only 15 percent of federal judges, 15 percent of law firm partners, 10 percent of law school deans, and 5 percent of managing partners of large law firms. While some believe this is just a “pipeline” problem, others are less sanguine. Confirming that differential treatment persists, law professor Deborah Rhode shows that men in legal practice still earn about $20,000 a year more than comparably qualified women and are at least twice as likely to make partner. A 2000 ABA Journal poll showed female lawyers to be less optimistic about professional opportunities than they were in 1983.

The meeting begins. Having started my work on covering, I sift what I hear through my framework. Many comments confirm that women, too, face covering demands. Female students describe pressure to mute attributes stereotypically associated with women, such as compassion, when speaking in class. Others assert peers and professors discredit work with a feminist bent. A mother says a female faculty mentor sent her to a clerkship interview with the parting advice “Don’t front the kid to the judge.”

But I also discern a contrapuntal theme—pressures that sound like the opposite of covering demands. A woman describes how a student received an anonymous letter telling her not to be so outspoken in class. Others report that professors are more likely to give housekeeping or hand-holding responsibilities to female teaching assistants. Such actions pressure women to be more like stereotypical women than stereotypical men. They are reverse-covering demands.

For the first time, I find myself entirely outside the covering experience I am considering. I recall an English professor asking whether the empathetic and analytic faculties are distinct: “Can we weep for the heroine while we admire the zoom shot?” I can choose to listen uncritically, to weep with these heroines. But I resolve not to suspend my disbelief. I look for zoom shots.

I wonder if the experience of being forced to quash emotional responses in class is specific to women.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.