The Ginger (Law) Librarian

The Harvard Business Review recently released the results of an enlightening new study about the speech patterns during SCOTUS oral arguments. According to the article , a new empirical study shows that the male justices interrupt the female justices approximately three times as often as they interrupt each other during oral arguments.  HBR examined the transcripts of 15 years of Supreme Court oral arguments, finding that women do not have an equal opportunity to be heard on the highest court in the land. In fact, as more women join the court, the reaction of the male justices has been to increase their interruptions of the female justices. Many male justices are now interrupting female justices at double-digit rates per term, but the reverse is almost never true. In the last 12 years, during which women made up, on average, 24% of the bench, 32% of interruptions were of the female justices, but only 4% were by the female justices. And there is a consistently gendered pattern...

The clustering of women in legal writing, in clinics, in academic support, and in librarian positions means that a disproportionate number of women law teachers in the United States hold jobs with significantly lower pay, with more limited voting rights at faculty meetings, and with less support for many things that tenure-line faculty take for granted (sabbaticals, support for scholarship, travel, etc.). Starting today (International Women’s Day) and continuing until April 4th (Equal Pay Day), the Legal Writing Institute is collecting signatures on a statement advocating for all law professors to enjoy equal status – or “full citizenship” – on their faculties, regardless of the subject matter they teach. LWI Policy Statement on Full Citizenship for Law Faculty (Adopted March 2015): The LWI Board has adopted a policy statement on principles of equality for law faculty that will guide its future planning and decisions. This statement explicitly signals our commitment to the polic...

Once in a while, I run across a website that speaks to why I became a librarian. This time that website was Girls at Library . About GAL : Girls At Library (GAL) is an online journal that features engaging literary interviews with and book recommendations from remarkable, diverse women who share a passion for reading. A unique online resource for literature lovers, GAL invites the exchange of ideas, perspectives, and emotions that underscore what makes reading such a universal pursuit. The books one reads both shape the mind and reflect the soul: literature empowers, transports, and inspires. To this end, GAL promotes reading as a constructive and enriching act for everyone. Each interview offers keen insights, personal portraits, and an artful, intimate look inside the libraries of women from all walks of life. The " There's a Book for That " link helps you find a book for any situation.  There's also a " Nightstand Series " link that as...

This week, I ran across two articles that are good fodder for The Office or Office Space (or most of our lives). The first one dealt with imposter syndrome . The article states that [i]t’s estimated that 70% of people have imposter syndrome —the feeling that they don’t deserve to be where they are in life.  The author linked to an imposter syndrome test  for everyone to test their own inner imposters.  A score of 80 or higher shows an intense feeling of imposter syndrome, 61 to 80 shows frequent experience, and 41 to 60 shows moderate experience.  The silver lining is that [t]here is evidence to suggest that imposter syndrome correlates with success—and that those who don’t suffer imposter symptom are more likely to be the real frauds. People with imposter syndrome tend to be perfectionists, which means they’re likely to spend hours working overtime to make sure they excel in every single field. So if you do suffer from imposter syndrome, chances are you’re doi...

Generally, faculty like to use scores on student evaluations of teaching (SET) as a strong factor in hiring decisions because it is an "objective" measure while so much of tenure and promotion rests in the gray area. Did she publish enough? Maybe. Did she do enough service? Maybe. Were her teaching evals good? Yes or no. More recently, SET has come under fire. InsideHigherEd highlights a new paper that argues that SET are not only unreliable in evaluating teaching effectiveness but SET actually gauge students' gender bias and grade expectations better than they measure teaching.  There’s mounting evidence suggesting that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable. But are these evaluations, commonly referred to as SET, so bad that they’re actually better at gauging students’ gender bias and grade expectations than they are at measuring teaching effectiveness? A new paper argues that’s the case, and that evaluations are biased against female instructors in par...

You've gotta love a good "people's history." In my formative undergrad years, I remember working at a local bookstore and being exposed to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States . It. Blew. My. Young. Mind. And now a law librarian colleague (Thanks, Randy!) has brought a new "people's history" to my attention. It's called Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library . Despite dire predictions in the late twentieth century that public libraries would not survive the turn of the millennium, their numbers have only increased. Two of three Americans frequent a public library at least once a year, and nearly that many are registered borrowers. Although library authorities have argued that the public library functions primarily as a civic institution necessary for maintaining democracy, generations of library patrons tell a different story.  In Part of Our Lives , Wayne A. Wiegand delves into ...

In August, The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article on social bias in web technology (sub. req'd). The article noted that [w]hile automation is often thought to eliminate flaws in human judgment, bias—or the tendency to favor one outcome over another, in potentially unfair ways—can creep into complex computer code. Programmers may embed biases without realizing it, and they can be difficult to spot and root out. The results can alienate customers and expose companies to legal risk. Computer scientists are just starting to study the problem and devise ways to guard against it. One common error is endemic to a popular software technique called machine learning, said Andrew Selbst, co-author of “ Big Data’s Disparate Impact ,” a paper to be published next year by the California Law Review. Programs that are designed to “learn” begin with a limited set of training data and then refine what they’ve learned based on data they encounter in the real world, such as on the Inte...

With the recent retirement of James Billington as the Librarian of Congress, the United States is set to get its first new Librarian in nearly three decades. The current librarian , James Billington, has held the title since his appointment by President Reagan in 1987. Though named by the president and confirmed by the Senate, the Librarian doesn’t change with every new White House. After being appointed, Librarians are free to serve as long as they want—that’s why there have been only 13 of them since 1802. In other words, this will be the first time a new Librarian has been appointed since the invention of the web. Some interesting facts about the Librarian of Congress : The Librarian of Congress doesn’t need vocational experience as a librarian or a library science degree to hold the position. He— every Librarian since the position was created in 1802 has been male —is appointed by the President of the United States, must be approved by the Senate, and is responsible for the ...

If you are a woman in the law, it is impossible not to owe a debt to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, aka The Notorious R.B.G., who has broken down many barriers on her way to becoming the second female Supreme Court Justice. There have been calls for her to retire given her age, 81, to effectively "take one for the team" and get another liberal appointed to SCOTUS under the auspices of a Democratic president. As the NYTimes noted , "[t]he retirement talk started around 2011, when the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy wrote an essay in The New Republic arguing that both Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer should quit while there was still a Democratic president to nominate replacements. 'What’s more, both are, well, old,' he added uncharitably. As time moved on, the focus shifted almost exclusively to Ginsburg (“ Justice Ginsburg: Resign Already !”). Perhaps that’s simply because she is older than Breyer, who is now 76. Or perhaps there’s still an expectati...

The ABA Journal reported on a survey where the majority of respondents "still prefer men for some powerful professions, including lawyers." The survey consisted of 2,047 respondents chosen from a group of people 18 and older who agreed to participate in the survey. The survey wasn't random, so the results cannot be generalized, but the results still show certain societal preferences. "Sixty-five percent of survey respondents agreed that more women should be in positions of power, and 71 percent said they would be comfortable working or interacting with women lawyers. However, when asked to choose which gender they preferred working or interacting with if forced to make a choice, 53 percent preferred male over female lawyers." It's not surprising that some Americans still gravitate toward traditional gender roles. That inherent socialization is hard to break, but 53 percent is only slightly better than a coin flip, which means that many people don'...

The National Law Journal is reporting on the continued decline of female associates since the recession. "The percentage of women associates at law firms fell for the fourth straight year, even as the percentage of minority associates continued to rise. This year, women accounted for 44.79 percent of associates, down from 45.66 percent at their peak in 2009. By contrast, the percentage of minority associates rose from 8.36 percent in 2009 to 20.93 percent in 2013." Although the decline may seem slight, the author notes that it is a red flag because the associates will feed the partner pool one day. "While the percentage of women partners, small as it is, has continued to grow each year, sustained incremental growth in the future is at risk if the percentage of women associates continues to inch downwards." The legal profession needs to figure out why more women are foregoing the associate track. "It could be because some women are deciding not to pursue la...

An ABA Journal article reported on survey results of new partners and noted that "[a] greater percentage of female lawyers had a longer path to partnership than their male counterparts. The American Lawyer survey found that about 80 percent of the male lawyers surveyed made partner within a decade, compared to 66 percent of the women." Other survey findings: • Only 78 percent of new female partners said they felt adequately prepared for the job, compared to 90 percent of men. • Only 83 percent of new female partners said they had been asked to lead a team on a matter, compared to 93 percent of men. • Thirty percent of new female partners who weren't satisfied with some aspect of partnership cited gender bias as a reason. Twenty-eight percent cited cronyism. We've come a long way in terms of gender equality in the law, but study after study shows that there is still gender bias in our largest firms. "In the U.S. only 15% of partners in law firms are wo...

There are recent articles discussing the so-called 'fertility crisis' in the United States.  We, as a nation, are just not procreatin' like we used to. My conspiracy theory about this is that if we do not have enough babies today, we cannot afford Social Security tomorrow.  Is it a mere coincidence that there was a 'war on women' during the last election cycle -- in terms of reproductive choice? But do not fear!  We do have enough immigrants to make up the difference. “Over the next three decades, annual population growth for the working-age population will be less than a third of what it was over the last 60 years,” President Obama’s economic adviser Alan B. Krueger told the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March. “Given current trends, nearly all of the growth of the nation’s working-age population in the next 40 years will be accounted for by immigrants and their children.” Maybe conservatives should rethink their immigration stance if they wan...