Post #24

One female law student I encountered while in Washington DC had a really in depth conversation with me about her experiences in law school. She said that when people met her and found out she was in law school, they almost automatically thought she was in law school for family law, when in reality she was focusing on international law. She also pointed to how professors treated her in undergraduate studies when she voiced that she was going on to law school. She said that the overwhelming majority were extremely supportive of her goals in becoming a lawyer, saying it would be nice to see more women in the profession, and wished her good luck because it was going to be a difficult three years. In her first year of law school she found that she was actually one of many women in her class as opposed to so many reports and so much input she’d gotten that said she would be lost in a sea of men. She also found that in her classes, many of the women were much more competitive with each other as well as with their male counterparts when it came to class discussions and exam scores. She attributed this to the overall feeling she got from her female classmates that they needed to prove that they were just as good, if not better, than the male law students in their classes. She also encountered a lot of challenges from her professors, who seemed to favor the men in classes, constantly calling on them over women. She has characterized law school as a proving ground, where the work is hard, and so much time is spent perfecting arguments and papers because she feels like she needs to prove that she can get through law school and get a great job offer.

I think a lot of the concerns people have with women lawyers are seen in the article on our blackboard site with Sanda Day O’Connor. “As the court's first woman, she got a lot of letters of encouragement -- and also plenty of messages from detractors who questioned whether it was appropriate for a woman to serve in the nation's highest court.”