Unit D - Blog 27

Women are still clawing into the field of law, and because of this they are viewed as inferior based on the history of women in the field, and women not having education as available in the past. The easiest solution to overcome these perceptions is to compensate with hard flawless work, which will prevent skepticism. This is very comparable to Jackie Robinson being the first African American to play in major league baseball. He was handpicked by the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers for many reasons, but the most important was that he had enough athletic ability to perform at a level that they wouldn’t be able to question that. Women in law are doing the same thing; they are performing at a level that can’t be questioned. Many women prefer to do it themselves because they don’t want to be questioned as not being able to do it themselves by their male counterparts. Some women even talked about strategies to avoid giving men the ammunition to question them such as leaving talk about their family and children out of their work environment. I found the part about building relationships very interesting. English points out that there are cultural gender topics such as football and sports, and stogies and golf, which help build relationships between men, and women often don’t have those same opportunities to build relationships. There is also the concern of sexism. English suggests that men and women will likely work with the same sex to avoid awkwardness and not leave room for sexual misinterpretations. Another strategy that women use to capitalize in the courtroom is the underdog route. Women go into the trial or case over prepared and won’t miss a beat and wait for a moment to jump out and prove their competency. I don’t think they should have to do that, but they do. It works too. This is a strategy often used in sports. A losing team will get complete excessive preparation and come out and stomp a top team because the opposition is expecting a lower performance and it catches them off guard. Overall, women have found ways to combat these gender inequalities and have to do these things for the time being to neutralize the playing field. Hopefully this won’t have to happen in the future and these strong workers will have proved to men that they are capable and there won’t be any question.