Gender and the Law Blog

CFP Symposium, Women's Leadership in Law and Politics

Call for Proposals

Women’s Leadership in Law and Politics

Scholars Virtual Symposium

Sponsored by The Center for Constitutional Law & The Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron

Friday, February 21, 2025

The Center for Constitutional Law at Akron Law and The Bliss Institute of Applied Politics seek proposals for a Scholars Virtual Symposium to be held on Friday, February 21, 2025. Akron’s Center for Constitutional Law is one of four national centers established by Congress in 1986 for the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution to support legal research and public education on issues of constitutional import. Past presenters at the Center have included Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Justice Arthur Goldberg, Professor Reva Siegel, Professor Lawrence Solum, Professor Maggie Blackhawk, Professor Katie Eyer, Professor Harold Koh, Professor Kate Masur, Professor Julie Suk, and Professor Paula Monopoli, among many others. The Bliss Institute of Applied Politics is a bipartisan research, teaching and experiential learning institute dedicated to increasing understanding of the political process with special emphasis on political parties, grassroots activity, and civility and ethics.

The 2025 Scholars Symposium highlights questions of women’s leadership in law and politics. Recent events have brought heightened visibility to women’s political and leadership. Vice-President Kamala Harris became the presidential candidate. Women Justices reached a critical mass on the U.S. Supreme Court, constituting now four of nine Justices. Women’s grassroots initiatives and activism brought reproductive rights to the national agenda through state voting referenda in the wake of Dobbs. This symposium brings together scholars from disciplines including law, politics, history, and gender studies to explore the contours of what women’s political and legal leadership looks like. It will discuss trends, barriers, limitations, and impacts of women’s leadership.

Suggested topics for this symposium may include, but are in no way limited to:

• Why women’s representation in political and lawmaking institutions matters
• Barriers to women’s political and legal leadership
• Women judges – trends, history, and impact
• Women as political candidates
• Bias in women’s leadership – gender, racial, ethnicity bias, and DEI
• Personal attacks on women in leadership from AI, social media, and harassment
• The Hillary Factor – the antagonism to women candidates and the assumption women can’t win
• The Kamala Factor – undervaluing women’s power
• Grassroots women’s groups, g. Moms for Liberty, Red Wine & USA, MeToo
• Proportional Representation Reform, g. Alaska, Congress’s Fair Representation Act, international
• Comparative international women’s leadership in law, courts, and politics
• Women’s leadership in legal practice – firms, partners, MDL, arbitration, experts, judges
• Women’s political equality as seen in constitutional jurisprudence, including Dobbs
• Pipelines to women’s legal and political leadership
• Women as constitution makers (19th Amendment, ERA, global constitutions)

The symposium aims to ignite dialogue and discussion among scholars ruminating on these important issues. The price of admission, so to speak, is a short discussion paper to be published in the written symposium in the Spring 2025 edition of the Center for Constitutional Law’s open-access journal, ConLawNOW (also indexed in Westlaw, Lexis, and Hein). Papers should be about 3,000 to 5,000 words (5-10 published pages). These may be derivative works of longer works or books published elsewhere.

Those interested in participating in the 2025 Constitutional Law Scholars Symposium should send an abstract, title, and CV to Professor Tracy Thomas, Director of the Center for Constitutional Law at Akron, at [email protected]. Abstracts are welcomed beginning now, and should be submitted by December 1, 2024. 

Susan Ayres on "A Crazy Quilt: Infanticide in the United States"

Susan Ayres posted a book chapter on SSRN titled "A Crazy Quilt: Infanticide in the United States." The chapter is from the larger project, 100 Years of the Infanticide Act: Legacy, Impact and Future Directions (Karen Brennan and Emma Milne, eds., Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023). The abstract is here: 

This chapter builds on previous research to present a sampling of cases in the US, primarily in the twenty-first century, in order to show the harshness and disparity in criminal charges, defences and sentences. The broad term ‘infanticide’ is used for child-murder cases, and the more specific term ‘neonaticide’ is used for the killing of a child in the first 24 hours after birth. This chapter also describes the more recent use of genetic genealogy to solve cold cases of neonaticide. It concludes by considering how the absence of an infanticide offence and expanded defences results in an incoherent, unjust and irrational approach that ignores women’s vulnerabilities and fails to acknowledge the patterned nature of these cases.

Online Talk Featuring Khiara M. Bridges on "Expecting Inequity: Race, Class, and Reproductive Justice"

See the below announcement of an online program hosted by The Gibson-Banks Center for Race and the Law and the Law & Health Care Program at University of Maryland Carey School of Law. The event features Khiara M. Bridges, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law, speaking about "Expecting Inequity: Race, Class, and Reproductive Justice." The link to register is here. 

Professor Bridges has written many articles concerning race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press. She is currently writing her forthcoming book, Expecting Inequity: Race, Class, and Reproductive Justice.

This event is free, but registration is required. You will receive information on how to access the event in a separate email 48 hours before the webinar begins. If you have questions, please contact Gehan Girguis at [email protected]. This event will be recorded.

Feminist Legal Theory CRN Law & Society CFP

Monday, October 7th is the deadline to submit a proposal for the Law & Society Annual Meeting content affiliated with the Feminist Legal Theory Collaborative Research Network. Please send any questions, comments, or ideas for events to the CRN email address: [email protected]. Submit a form here. If you are submitting an individual proposal, after Section 4 in the form go to the bottom of the section and hit next and on Section 9 hit submit to finalize your submission. If you are submitting a multi-authored paper or if you are submitting one of the other format types, after Section 4 in the form only complete the appropriate section for you and on Section 9 hit submit to finalize your submission. The Planning Committee especially welcomes the following: 

The following non-exhaustive list is intended to provide examples of topic areas, and not to limit scholarly and creative engagement of feminist legal theory within the conference themes:

• Present-day Inequalities Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism

• Consequences of Neoliberal Economic and Social Policies

• Health & Environmental Crises such as HIV/AIDS, Covid 19, Monkeypox, Climate Change, Natural Disasters

• Military, Police, and Other Pervasive Violence against Marginalized People

• Access to Justice & Legal Empowerment Issues & Approaches

• Inequalities related to Reproduction and Reproductive Technologies

• Immigration & Displacement

• LGTBQ+ Discrimination

• Unequal and Separate Treatment of Children

• Legal Education & Inequality

• Discrimination based on Marriage & Family Formation

• State Criminalizing Practices predicated on Gender

• Feminization of Poverty

• Perspectives on Exploitation & Resistance Movements

• Transnational/International/Comparative Feminist Critiques

• Feminism and Legal History

We especially welcome proposals that would permit us to collaborate with other CRNs and that are multidisciplinary in approach. We strongly encourage colleagues from the Global South, indigenous colleagues, and colleagues from various minority groups to submit proposals.

 

Gendering the New International Norms on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies

Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Gendering the New International Norms on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies  

A flurry of landmark international digital rules is soon to make its debut in the international law arena. At the Summit of the Future, in September 2024, the Secretary General plans to announce the Digital Global Compact 2023, an ambitious vision to close the various digital divides and to fast track progress toward the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.  In March of 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted the first ever UN General Assembly Resolution on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Sustainable Development.  Five months later, in August of 2024, the United Nations approved the draft of a global cybercrimes treaty; this historic draft agreement, coined the United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime, will go before the UN General Assembly in this upcoming fall.  

Last year, ahead of the 2023 Summit of the Future, the Secretary General introduced his Agenda for Peace, committing to “Transforming the gendered power dynamics in peace and security.”  In line with his vision, together, these new and evolving frameworks provide the first history-making normative landscape for new technologies at the global level. This Article critically examines the role of gender in these burgeoning frameworks as pivotal to elements in a rapidly changing digital ecosystem. While the current normative foci overlook important aspects of gender equality, they also elide the rise of ChatGPT and other Generative AI and their impact on gender. The primacy of gender equal participation in digital and cybersecurity governance should be a pillar of the new global digital order. 

The Impact of Dobbs on Employment Law and Women Workers

Laura T. Kessler, Reproductive Justice at Work: Employment Law After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 109 Cornell L. Rev. (2024)  

In June 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, landmark decisions which held that the U.S. Constitution protected a right to abortion prior to fetal viability. Overnight, about 64 million American women of childbearing age potentially lost the right to decide what happens in their own bodies. In the two years since the decision, seventeen states have made most or all abortions illegal, with the fight over abortion still taking place in state and federal courts.  Experts across fields have explored the decision's effects on health, economic security, medical privacy, the patient-physician relationship, access to assisted reproduction, marriage equality and other LGBT+ rights, constitutional sex equality, disability rights, and medical research. Less attention has been given to the impact of Dobbs on employment law and women workers. To fill this gap, this Article examines the post-Dobbs landscape in which workers' reproductive experiences and capacities may be used to justify employment discrimination.

Part I provides the sociomedical and legal landscape upon which this Article’s arguments rest.  Specifically, Part I.A. demonstrates that common reproductive health experiences such as abortion, infertility, and miscarriage are often indistinguishable, as the symptoms and treatments for these conditions significantly overlap.  Given this overlap, after Dobbs, all of these reproductive health events are becoming more complicated (and potentially dangerous) medically and uncertain legally. Part I.B. provides a brief overview of four major federal employment statutes relevant to workers’ reproductive freedom and reproductive lives—the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 (PDA),  the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA),  the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act of 2022 (PWFA),  and Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA).  My emphasis is on how (with the exception of the PWFA, which is new), federal courts have significantly undermined federal protections for workers affected by common reproductive health conditions despite Congress’s broad remedial purposes in passing federal employment statutes and the EEOC’s loyal interpretations of them.

Part II goes on to examine more closely some of the judicially imposed gaps that render federal employment statutes particularly ineffective in addressing workers’ reproductive lives.  In particular, Part II examines the weak or nonexistent medical privacy and antiretaliation protections provided by federal antidiscrimination and family leave laws, largely due to constraining lower court interpretations.  It also examines the mismatch between the culture of secrecy surrounding workers’ common reproductive health experiences such as abortion, infertility, pregnancy, and miscarriage and federal employment statutes and legal doctrines that require workers to share private health information as a precondition to receiving legal protections.  As Part II argues, the criminalization of abortion in the wake of Dobbs is likely to exacerbate these legal and cultural conditions that render federal employment law particularly ineffective in this realm.

Part III turns to solutions, inviting introspection and regulatory shifts to include the full spectrum of a person's reproductive life in mainstream employment law. Among other reforms, Part III examines the recently-passed Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), a new federal law providing a basic right to reasonable workplace accommodations for pregnancy and related medical conditions. The PWFA is a significant victory for pregnant workers and women's rights.  But, as Part III argues, in some significant respects, the PWFA does not go far enough, because it does not sufficiently shore up privacy and antiretaliation protections that workers need to meaningfully access reasonable accommodations in a legal landscape where abortion is a crime and even a miscarriage or failed IVF cycle may be prosecuted as an abortion. Therefore, as Part III argues, enhanced medical privacy and antiretaliation protections in all of our federal employment statutes are required.  Without such protections, the entire legal regime of substantive protections from sex and disability discrimination at work will be severely weakened for women workers post-Dobbs.  Finally, Part III argues that it is time for a national paid sick leave law in the United States.  Such a law is also necessary to address the unique vulnerabilities of women workers in a post-Dobbs world.

ND Federal District Court Holds Catholic Employers Do Not Have to Follow EEOC Rule to Accommodate Workers for IVF or Abortion

Judge Rules Catholic Employers Can Now Deny Workers Time Off For Abortion or IVF 

More than 8,000 Catholic employers across the country will not be required to provide accommodations for workers needing abortion or fertility care following a ruling in North Dakota. 

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act took effect in June 2023, granting workers — many of them low-wage women — protections if they needed time off from work for pregnancy-related conditions. Earlier this year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces the law, released rules that broadly defined pregnancy-related conditions to include anything from morning sickness to an abortion or fertility care. Under the rules, workers could request time off to get an abortion or for an IVF procedure, for example, and employers must work in good faith to provide the accommodation. 

But the Catholic Benefits Association and the Diocese of Bismarck sued the EEOC this summer, arguing that a broad interpretation of the law that included abortion and fertility protections would be violating Catholic employers’ religious freedom. 

The EEOC, the complaint said, “hijacked this statute and demanded that Catholic and other employers affirmatively accommodate abortion and immoral fertility treatments.”  

The EEOC rules don’t require employers to pay for the care, just to provide time off to allow workers to seek it. 

The Eighth Circuit, where North Dakota is located, is also hearing a case challenging the entirety of the EEOC Accommodation Rule issued pursuant to the Pregnancy Fairness Act. See Gender Law Blog, Eighth Circuit First to Consider EEOC Rule Including Abortion-Related Worker Accommodations.

Lots going on in North Dakota these days. See also North Dakota Abortion Ban Overturned as Vague and Violating Women's Fundamental Rights To Choice and Medical Freedom

The History of the Gendered Term "Congressman" and its Neutral Alternative "Representative"

You Should Call House Members "Representatives"

For most of the nation’s history, members of the U.S. House of Representatives have been addressed as “Congressman” or “Congresswoman.” By contrast, a senator is referred to as, well, “Senator.”

These gendered terms for House members dominate in journalism, everyday conversation and among members of Congress.

The name Congress refers to the entire national legislature, composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Gender identity aside, Congressman and Congresswoman are fundamentally inaccurate terms.

In the Constitution, Congress refers to the legislative branch as a whole. When discussing the membership of Congress, the Constitution uses “Representatives” and “Senators,” but also “Members” in reference to both. “Congressman” is nowhere in that founding document.

One of the foremost scholars of Congress, the late Richard Fenno, wrote, “a House member’s designation, as prescribed in the U.S. Constitution, is not Congressman, it is Representative.”

As a scholar of Congress and particularly the Senate, I am interested in the differences between the two chambers and how that affects American politics. In my investigation of the origins and evolution of congressman and congresswoman, I combed the records of colonial and state legislatures, as well as records related to the country’s founding and newspapers from the end of the 1700s to the mid-1900s.

Even if the current era were not one of justified sensitivity to gender neutrality and diversity, these two terms for House members are not just dated, they are wrong. Representative is the correct but rarely used term.

North Dakota Abortion Ban Overturned as Vague and Violating Women's Fundamental Rights To Choice and Medical Freedom

Washington Post, Judge Overturns North Dakota's Near-Total Abortion Ban

A North Dakota judge struck down the state’s near-total ban on abortion Thursday, saying the state constitution gives women a “fundamental right to choose abortion” before fetal viability. Restrictions on the right is “a violation on medical freedom,” he ruled.

State District Judge Bruce Romanick declared the law, enacted by the legislature last year, “unconstitutionally void for vagueness.” The statute made the procedure illegal in all cases except rape or incest when the woman has been pregnant for less than six weeks or when the pregnancy poses a serious physical health threat. Doctors and other health care professionals found to be in violation of the law could be charged with a felony — and then face up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of $10,000.

In the conservative state, where lawmakers have twice passed bans that courts subsequently ruled against, the victory for abortion rights supporters was a bittersweet one. North Dakota no longer has any abortion clinics; its onetime sole provider and plaintiff in the lawsuit, the Red River Women’s Clinic, moved from Fargo to Moorhead, Minn., in 2022.

IVF After Dobbs, and Statutory Distinctions of Pregnancy Versus External Embryos

Kerry Lynn Macintosh, Dobbs, Abortion Laws, and in Vitro Fertilization, 26 J. Health Care Law & Policy (2023)  

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization held that there is no constitutional right to an abortion. The Supreme Court distinguished abortion from other constitutionally-protected conduct on the ground that abortion destroys potential life. Given that outcome and rationale, it is timely to review the legal status of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a medical procedure in which human embryos are often lost and multiple fetuses sometimes reduced. This Article canvasses abortion laws and finds that most do not reach IVF and related practices. However, legislatures may enact future laws that ban or restrict IVF in order to protect embryos and fetuses. Thus, this Article evaluates the constitutionality of such laws after Dobbs. It concludes that bans on IVF are unconstitutional as applied to individuals who cannot procreate coitally. However, courts may uphold laws that restrict IVF-related practices that endanger or kill embryos or fetuses.

Eighth Circuit First to Consider EEOC Rule Including Abortion-Related Worker Accommodations

Bloomberg, First Appeals Court to Mull EEOC Abortion Accommodation Rule

• 17 states to argue on appeal for injunction on pregnancy rule
• US Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision likely to be raised

The EEOC’s inclusion of abortion-related worker accommodations in a pregnancy anti-bias rule will encounter a significant test at the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit as it reviews a challenge from red state attorneys general.

The 17 state AGs will urge the circuit judges on Tuesday to reverse a district court’s decision that they lacked standing to bring their suit. They seek to block and vacate the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s April final rule under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

The Eighth Circuit will be the first appellate court to hear oral arguments on the regulation as the EEOC’s enforcement of the PWFA has faced conflicting fates in challenges filed by Republican states, as well as some anti-abortion Catholic groups, across the country. An Eighth Circuit decision to allow a pause on the regulation’s enforcement would be a blow to the agency’s rulemaking authority, and could impede on abortion-related workplace accommodations like employee leave.

Report on "Deepening the Divide: Abortion Bans Further Harm Immigrant Communities"

A new fact sheet has been published on the harms of abortion bans to immigrant communities. This report was authored by Lucie Arvallo, Hannah Liu, Suma Setty, Priya Pandey, Salen Andrews, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, and the Center for Law and Social Policy. The introduction is excerpted here: 

Im/migrants, especially those who are undocumented and those in mixed-status families, are particularly vulnerable to the harmful impacts of abortion bans due to the barriers they face in accessing health care and the increased risk of criminalization based on immigration status. These barriers and risks include arbitrary Customs and Border Protection (CBP) checkpoints, a five-year waiting period for legal permanent residents to enroll in public health insurance programs, agreements between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, and increasing anti-immigrant state policies. Individuals in immigration detention face additional threats to their reproductive health and overall well-being, including medically unnecessary gynecological procedures like forced hysterectomies and denial of abortion care. This fact sheet highlights how Dobbs compounded pre-existing barriers to abortion care for im/migrants. We propose a set of concrete recommendations for Congress and the administration to support im/migrant access to abortion.

Arnow-Richman on "Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Panes of Equity Partnership"

Rachel Arnow-Richman has published Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Panes of Equity Partnership in Volume 17 of the Florida International University Law Reivew. The abstract is below: 

This Article, prepared for a “micro-symposium” on Professor Kerri Stone’s monograph Panes of the Glass Ceiling (2022), explores the partnership pay gap in large law firms and the role of high-profile litigation in facilitating pay equity. There is a rich literature and extensive data on the gender attainment gap in elite law practice, particularly with regard to women’s attrition from practice and poor representation within the partnership ranks. Less attention has been paid to the way in which the exceptional women who achieve equity partner status continue to lag behind their male peers. This Article explores “Women v. BigLaw,” a cluster of equal pay cases brought by women partners in the late 2010s against elite firms. Using Stone’s work as a lens, it reveals how the same unspoken beliefs that underlie the law firm glass ceiling operate above it, placing women partners at the bottom of a new compensation hierarchy centered on origination credit. Due to historical allocations, a culture of deference toward male rainmakers, and implicitly biased attorney development and evaluation practices, origination operates as a form of “legacy credit” that locks in preexisting entitlements favoring male partners. Despite this, gender equity in law practice has been framed principally as a professional value, not a legal imperative. Women v. BigLaw and the unprecedented use of the court system by women lawyers reveals, however, that partnership pay practices pose a liability risk to firms. This new reality may incent structural change in ways that attention to gender equity as a managerial and professional goal could not.

Lofaso and Kiner on "The Dobbs Effect on West Virginia"

Anne Marie Lofaso and Cameron Kiner have published The Dobbs Effect on West Virginia in Volume 125 of the West Virginia Law Review. The abstract is excerpted below:  

Humans have practiced birth control, including abortion, for thousands of years. Pregnant individuals have sought abortions for many reasons even though the abortion procedure itself has often been dangerous to the pregnant person’s life. Moreover, a stable consensus concerning the debate about when life begins and other questions surrounding abortion has rarely if ever been attained. Notwithstanding the numerous questions raised by this indisputably controversial subject, this article is quite limited in scope. In Section I, we review the development and retrenchment of an individual’s right to terminate their pregnancy starting on January 22, 1973, the day that the United States Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that women have a legal right to terminate their pregnancies—a right that individual states could not override in some circumstances. In Section II, we trace the development and retrenchment of that right in West Virginia. We conclude by observing that the post-Dobbs world is fraught with political subterfuge, making legislative consensus difficult even where there is actual agreement.

Care Post-Roe Study Findings

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health has published an updated report in September 2024 on Care Post-Roe: Documenting Cases of Poor-Quality Care Since the Dobbs Decision.  The Executive Summary is excerpted here: 

 

This report presents the findings of the Care PostRoe Study to date. Between September 2022 and August 2024, we received 86 submissions from health care providers describing detailed cases of care that deviated from the usual standard due to new laws restricting abortion. The patients described in the narrative submissions lived in one of 19 states that banned abortion following Dobbs. Patients described in the narratives submitted by health care providers represent a range of different ages, income levels, and racial and ethnic backgrounds, with a notable proportion involving patients reported to be Black or Latinx, populations that often face more barriers to care.

 

Cases in the narratives fell into several categories: 1. Obstetric complications in the second trimester prior to fetal viability, including preterm prelabor rupture of membranes, hemorrhage, cervical dilation, and hypertension; 2. Ectopic pregnancy, including cesarean scar ectopic; 3. Underlying medical conditions that made continuing a pregnancy dangerous; 4. Severe fetal anomalies or other fetal compromise; 5. Miscarriage; 6. Extreme delays in obtaining abortion care; 7. Intersection with the carceral system; 8. Difficulty obtaining post-abortion care; and 9. Delays obtaining medical care unrelated to abortion.

 

The post-Dobbs laws and their interpretations altered the standard of care across these scenarios in ways that contributed to delays, worsened health outcomes, and increased the cost and logistic complexity of care. In several cases, patients experienced preventable complications, such as severe infection or having the placenta grow deep into the uterine wall and surrounding structures, because clinicians reported their “hands were tied,” making it impossible for them to provide treatment sooner. One physician described a case of a patient who had ruptured membranes at 16-18 weeks’ gestation but was denied an abortion because of a new state law. She was sent home and developed a severe infection requiring management in the intensive care unit. The patient subsequently delivered her fetus but required a procedure to remove her placenta. The physician wrote, “The anesthesiologist cries on the phone when discussing the case with me—if the patient needs to be intubated, no one thinks she will make it out of the OR.” Health care providers described feeling moral distress when they were unable to provide evidencebased care, and some reported considering moving their practices to a state where abortion remains legal. 

March of Dimes Report on Maternal Care Deserts

The March of Dimes has published a report titled Nowhere to Go: Maternity Care Deserts Across the US. Excerpts from the Executive Summary are below: 

Our latest national report on maternity care access in the United States (US) reveals a stark reality; where you live matters when it comes to the options available for maternity care. While some progress has been made to increase access to care, such as expanding and extending Medicaid, we continue to witness steady reports of obstetric unit closures and workforce shortages. In fact, 1 in every 25 obstetric units in the US shuttered their doors in the last 2 years, resulting in fewer choices, increased stress, and greater travel times for birthing people. The 2024 Nowhere to Go: Maternity Care Deserts in the US report reveals that over 35% of counties are considered maternity care deserts. This means that in 1,104 US counties, there is not a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician. These counties are home to over 2.3 million women of reproductive age and are the resident county of women who gave birth to over 150,000 babies in 2022.

 

Our most comprehensive analysis to date confirms that women living in maternity care deserts and counties with low access to care have poorer health before pregnancy, receive less prenatal care, and experience higher rates of preterm birth. Our analysis revealed an excess of over 10,000 preterm births among those living in maternity care deserts and limited access counties in 2020-2022. These findings affirm that US systems, policies, and environments are failing moms and babies.

 

Over 1 in 3 US counties lack a single obstetric clinician, and in many parts of the country obstetriciansgynecologists (OB-GYNs) and family physicians who deliver babies are leaving the workforce. Moreover, while midwives could supplement the obstetric workforce, 23 states have policies that inhibit them from administering the level of care they were trained to provide. Furthermore, 70% of birth centers in the US are within just 10 states. Our report examines policies that reduce barriers to integrating midwives into the healthcare system and make opening and sustaining birth centers more attainable. Both could provide more options for birthing people, decrease health expenditures, and improve satisfaction and birth outcomes. In addition, the report offers insights into how low insurance reimbursement rates and payment structures contribute to hospital closures, especially in rural areas. 

Invitation to Online Book Launch of Feminist Legislation Project on Sept. 25

Below is an invitation to a book launch of the Feminist Legislation Project from co-editor Becky Batagol. More information about the book project is here:   

Please come to the launch of the Feminist Legislation Project: Rewriting Laws for Gender-Based Justice edited collection created and edited by me, Professor Kate Seear, Assoc Prof Heli Askola and Dr Jamie Walvisch.

This book is the result of 7 years of Monash-led collaborative feminist work across Australia by leading law academics, lawyers, activists and those with lived experience of the problems we identify. We decided to go past the usual academic criticism of law and to actually show what legislation could look like if its concern was to create justice for women and those who experience gender-harm. 

Each chapter contains a short piece of legislation – proposed in order to address a contemporary legal problem from a feminist perspective. These range across criminal law (sexual offences, Indigenous women’s experiences of criminal law, laws in relation to forced marriage, modern slavery, childcare and sentencing), civil law (aged care and housing rights, regulating the gig economy; surrogacy, gender equity in the construction industry) and constitutional law (human rights legislation, reimagining parliaments where laws are made for the benefit of women). The proposed laws are, moreover, drafted with feedback from a senior parliamentary draftsperson (providing guidance to contributors in a personal capacity), to ensure conformity with legislative rigour, as well as accompanied by an explanation of their reasons and their aims. Although the legislation is Australian-based, the issues raised by each are recognisably global, and are reflected in the legislation of most other nations.

This is the world's first feminist legislation project and we think its methods can be applied worldwide. It also has great potential to lead to law reform as the book contains 16 proposals for law reform, complete with second reading speech and legislative drafting.  It will appeal to scholars of feminist legal studies, gender and the law, gender studies and others studying or working in relevant legal areas.

 

The book launch, which will take place at the Sky Room (Monash Business School), Level 14, at 30 Collins Street in Melbourne's CBD, on Wednesday 25 September, 5-7pm. We will organise Zoom access for those who can't attend in person. The invitation is attached and you can RSVP here by 16 September.

 

The book is open access, meaning it is free, not behind the usual academic paywalls and available to read and download here.

 

Addressing Gender Biases and Barriers to Women's Leadership in Mass Tort Multidistrict Litigation

Stephanie Iken, Addressing Biases and Barriers: Advancing Women in Mass Tort MDL Leadership 

The legal profession grapples with profound gender disparities, particularly evident in leadership roles within mass tort litigation. This article delves into the myriad biases and systemic barriers that hinder women's advancement in legal leadership, shedding light on the challenges they face and proposing strategies for fostering gender equity.

The analysis begins by examining the lack of representation of women in mass tort leadership, despite their significant presence in law school cohorts. Data reveals stark disparities in the appointment rates of women to leadership positions, underscoring systemic biases entrenched within the legal industry. Biases such as the Prove-It-Again Bias, Tightrope Bias, and Maternal Wall contribute to the underrepresentation of women in leadership roles, perpetuating a cycle of discrimination and marginalization.

The Prove-It-Again Bias dictates that women must continually prove their competence and dedication, facing greater scrutiny and exhaustion than their male counterparts. Women experience challenges in asserting their ideas and contributions, often facing dismissal or attribution of their work to others. Moreover, the Tightrope Bias imposes restrictive standards on women's behavior, forcing them to navigate contradictory expectations and behaviors. The Maternal Wall presents additional barriers, as women encounter biases against mothers and birthing persons, leading to challenges in balancing family and career aspirations.

The article further explores biases against women in leadership roles, including interruptions, the "Boys Club" mentality, dismissal of accomplishments, and delegation of stereotypical tasks. These biases perpetuate gender inequalities and hinder women's career advancement, creating environments where women's voices are silenced, and their contributions undervalued.

The gender pay gap exacerbates disparities, with women overwhelmingly paid less for equal work, stifling their economic empowerment and career progression. Sexual harassment and networking challenges further compound these inequalities, creating hostile environments that deter women from pursuing leadership roles.

However, amidst these challenges, the article highlights initiatives and strategies for advancing women in legal leadership. Mentorship programs, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and policy reforms emerge as critical tools for fostering gender equity and dismantling systemic biases. By creating inclusive environments, challenging traditional norms, and prioritizing the well-being of female professionals, the legal profession can work towards creating a more diverse and equitable future for women in leadership roles.

In conclusion, the article calls for transformative action to address biases and barriers hindering women's advancement in legal leadership. By acknowledging and confronting systemic inequalities, implementing inclusive practices, and advocating for policy reforms, the legal profession can strive towards a future where women are equally represented and empowered in leadership roles within mass tort litigation and beyond.

Re-examining the Three-Year Legal Education Through a Critical Theory Lens

Paula A. Monopoli, Remembering the Origins of Modern Legal Education, 85 University of Pittsburgh Law Review 305 (2023)

American legal education came under tremendous pressure in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. That crisis precipitated a decline in law school applications and a concomitant decrease in the size of American law school enrollments during the 2011-2012 academic year. Commentators offered a myriad of proposals for reforming legal education during that period. Yet many of those proposals failed to gain traction, and a decade later legal education looks much the same, albeit with smaller enrollments. One of those proposals was to shorten the three-year course of study. In this Article, I revisit the origins of that long-standing feature of American legal education introduced by Christopher Columbus Langdell, Dean of Harvard Law School, in the nineteenth century and later embraced by the legal education's regulatory bodies in the twentieth century. Viewed through a critical theory lens, its intractability can be explained, in part, by the persistence of exclusionary impulses and masculine norms in the legal profession from its origins to the current day. This Article proposes that American law faculty revive previous conversations about the value of this central design feature. And the subordinating effects of that feature should be a factor in weighing the costs and benefits of moving to a shorter course of study.

Gender, Family and Domestic Innovation in Postwar America

Jorge L. Contreras, Mrs. Aronson’s Patent: Gender, Family and Domestic Innovation in Postwar America" 
62 Houston Law Review (2024, Forthcoming)

This article unearths the curious and hitherto unexplored history of Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co. (U.S. 1979). Though the case occupies an important niche in the jurisprudence of patent misuse and preemption, its history illuminates broader issues surrounding innovation policy and gender that are increasingly relevant today. First, Aronson tells a story of domestic innovation-common sense ingenuity that emerges far from university laboratories and Silicon Valley startups. In this respect, the story is an inspirational one: anyone with a bright idea and a little bit of gumption can become an inventor. Even better: the legal system is there, in the form of patents, to help them transact on an equal footing with corporate entities. But Aronson also highlights the very real gender disparities that continue to burden the innovation economy. This account thus joins other recent expositions of the prejudices and hurdles faced by mid-twentieth century American women in the sciences and engineering. Like these accounts, Aronson shows that women inventors were at a serious disadvantage compared to their male counterparts-not only when dealing with governmental agencies, but also within the social structures imposed by their familial relationships. Relying on personal interviews and extensive archival research, this article explores both the history and implications of Aronson. It is hoped that its historical insights will support efforts aimed at addressing these persistent issues today.