Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Tribal Authority and the Reauthorized Violence Against Women Act

Angela Riley, Crime and Governance in Indian Country, 63 UCLA L Rev. (forthcoming)

Abstract:     

Criminal jurisdiction in Indian country is defined by a central, ironic paradox. Recent federal laws expanding tribal criminal jurisdiction are, in many respects, enormous victories for Indian country, as they acknowledge and reify a more robust notion of tribal sovereignty, one capable of accommodating increased tribal control over safety and security on Indian reservations. At the same time, the laws make clear that sovereignty comes at a price, potentially working to effectuate further assimilation of tribal courts and Indian people. As a result, at the same time that tribal sovereignty gains ground in ways critical to autonomy and self-governance, it is simultaneously threatened by exogenous forces that have the potential to homogenize tribal justice systems legally, politically, and — in particular — culturally.

This Article offers the first comprehensive assessment of the Tribal Law and Order Act and the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, respectively, to show how they relate to one another on the ground and the implications for tribal sovereignty and self-determination. Ultimately, based on data compiled for the first time as well as extensive secondary sources, I argue that expanded criminal jurisdiction and punishment authority have, perhaps paradoxically, enhanced the ability of tribes to develop and enforce policies, laws, and procedures that are consistent with tribal custom and tradition. This presents a unique opportunity worthy of further exploration. In other words, rather than sovereignty and assimilation expanding in tension with one another, I find that the application of the laws has been experienced in tribal communities, as least anecdotally and preliminarily, as greatly enhancing — not threatening or destroying — tribal sovereignty and Indian cultural survival.

 

August 31, 2016 in Courts, Violence Against Women | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gender By Far is the Biggest Determinant of Who Should do Housework

Huff Post, Most Americans Still Think Women Should Do the Bulk of the Housework

If bitter fights over dirty dishes feel like the gender wars, or you’ve found yourself ranting about The Second Shift, a new study from Indiana University suggests you’re onto something. For most Americans, the survey study found, chore roles align with traditional thinking on masculinity and femininity ― even among couples where a woman is the primary or sole breadwinner and even in same-sex couples. 

 

The researchers were surprised by how much gender mattered ― and how little income did.

 

“Most research on housework suggests that couples divide housework along different axes; for example, lower-earning partners do more housework than higher-earning partners,” said lead author Natasha Quadlin, a doctoral student at Indiana University. “Instead, our findings suggest that [gender] is by far the biggest determinant of Americans’ attitudes toward housework.”

 

Gender matters more than income

 

Participants assigned straight women more female-typed chores, more gender-neutral chores and more physical and emotional caregiving than their partners. This held true even if the woman earned more money than the man.

 

While relative income determined whether or not the husband or the wife would become the stay-at-home caregiver, Quadlin pointed out that low-earning men in straight relationships were still expected to do fewer chores and fewer childcare tasks than their wives.

 

But even though gender mattered most, Quadlin found that participants gave primary responsibility for cooking, cleaning, laundry and dishes, as well as being a primary caregiver for a child, to lower-earning partners, while expecting the higher- wage earners to manage the household finances. Income didn’t have any bearing on groceries, car maintenance or outdoor chores. However, the effects of relative income were minor — for instance, low-wage earners were given responsibility for cooking 55 percent of the time, versus 45 percent for higher earners.

 

August 31, 2016 in Family, Gender, Pop Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, August 25, 2016

10 Books by Women to Read Before Starting Law School

Feminist Legal History Website and Visual History

This website Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution  launched last fall tells the backstory of modern feminist and legal history from about 1940 to present.  It includes terrific videos, photos, book resources, and detailed news that fill in the backstory of the women's political and legal movement.  Great stuff to show in class or use for research.

For example, here is the entry and links for the 1963 Equal Pay Act

This amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act prohibits pay discrimination on the basis of sex when workers perform substantially equal work and has been credited as one factor in the rise of women’s wages overall. The passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 demonstrates that work in this area is not complete.

Text of the Equal Pay Act.

Photos, John F. Kennedy Library

JFK Signs the Equal Pay Act.

 

 

August 25, 2016 in Equal Employment, Legal History | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

The Profoundly Gendered Nature of Conjugal Liability

 Sarah Lynn Swann, Conjugal Liability

Because of a commitment to the concept of individual culpability, holding someone responsible for the wrongdoing of another is a relatively rare occurrence in American jurisprudence. This Article reveals a significant, yet largely unacknowledged, source of such liability: conjugal liability. Conjugal liability occurs when one spouse or intimate partner is held legally responsible, either directly or indirectly, for their partner’s wrongful acts. Conjugal liability penalizes one intimate partner for the actions of the other in a vast array of legal fields and domains, ranging from tort, criminal law, property and employment law, to creditor’s remedies, bankruptcy, and tax law.

 

Within these domains, conjugal liability is deployed for a variety of laudable purposes, such as the prevention of harm to third parties, the deterrence of drug or other criminal activity, and the expansion of creditor’s remedies. However, conjugal liability is a deeply problematic way of achieving these goals. First, in operation, it is profoundly gendered: most often, it holds wives and girlfriends legally responsible for the wrongdoing of their husbands or boyfriends.***

 

Conjugal liability raises three main concerns. First, as many of the examples in the taxonomy of demonstrate, conjugal liability has gendered consequences. In operation, it tends to spread liability from men to women, making wives and girlfriends experience a punitive fall-out from the wrongful acts of their male intimate partners. Moreover, it often places the very difficult burden of attempting to control a partner onto particularly vulnerable women. Second, conjugal liability is, in some instances, a form of guilt by association. Third, conjugal liability offends the constitutional right to freedom of association, not only because of its gendered and guilt-by-association aspect, but also because it implicates the constitutionally-guaranteed privacy and liberty interests in “maintain[ing] certain intimate human relationships." Specifically, conjugal liability dictates when individuals should enter relationships, how they should behave once they are in them, and under what circumstances they should exit. It sets behavioral standards for what good spouses and partners must do, and punishes those who fail to meet this bar, thereby rendering an individual’s right to enter, maintain, and exit intimate relationships illusory.*

 

In operation, conjugal liability is profoundly gendered. Whereas traditional coverture held husbands legally responsible for the torts and petty crimes of their wives, conjugal liability reverses this gendered responsibility ascription. It tends to hold wives and women legally responsible for the wrongful acts of their husbands and male intimate partners, rather than the other way around. In part because of the sociological reality that men tend to engage in criminological behaviors more than women (meaning they commit sexual harms, engage in violent acts, and perform drug-trafficking activities more often than women), and in part because of cultural beliefs about appropriate gender roles, conjugal liability allocates responsibility in gendered ways.

 

Indeed, despite coverture’s traditional legal fiction that husbands were responsible for the petty crimes and torts of their wives, there is a long-running countervailing cultural tradition of assigning to wives and women the role of “moral compass” for potentially wayward men.

August 24, 2016 in Gender | Permalink | Comments (0)

Study Shows Faculty Gender Diversity has Improved, but not on Tenure Track and not at the Top

Inside Higher Ed, Study Finds Gains in Faculty Diversity, But Not on Tenure Track

Diversifying the professoriate has long been a priority on many campuses, and such goals have only grown more urgent in light of recent national and local discussions about race. Yet college and university faculties have become just slightly more diverse in the last 20 years, according to a new study from the TIAA Institute. Most importantly, as faculty jobs have become more stratified with the growth of non-tenure-track positions over the same period, most gains for underrepresented minority groups have been in the most precarious positions. That is, not on the tenure track.***

 

Underrepresented minority groups held approximately 13 percent of faculty jobs in 2013, up from 9 percent in 1993. Yet they still only hold 10 percent of tenured jobs, according to the study. Women now hold 49 percent of total faculty positions but just 38 percent of tenured jobs.

 

Women’s Trajectory

 

Women’s faculty head count growth nearly doubled that of men between 1993 and 2013, at approximately 375,300 additional women and 196,900 men. Women’s growth in full-time appointments quintupled that of men, and a major change was observed in women’s appointment to tenured positions in particular: an increase of about 46,700 women compared to a decrease among men of about 14,900.

 

The magnitude of women’s growth in full-time and tenured or tenure-track appointments pales in comparison to their growth in part-time appointments, however, at about 144 percent, and full-time, non-tenure-track appointments, at about 122 percent.

 

Less optimistically, and to Finkelstein’s point about multiple metrics, the proportion of all women faculty who are tenured or on the tenure track has actually declined from 20 percent to 16 percent and 13 percent to 8 percent, respectively.

 

At the same time, the percentage of women who are in part-time appointments increased from 48 percent to 56 percent.

 

The proportion of all women in full-time, non-tenure-track positions held steady at about 18 percent.

 

Women continue to be less likely than men to hold full-time appointments, at 44 percent of women faculty members compared to 52 percent of men.

 

Regarding the “ultimate prize,” or a full professorship, fewer than one in 10 faculty women -- about 9 percent -- have achieved it. That's up only slightly from 6 percent of women in 1993. And the years since 1993 have seen women earn much larger shares of doctorates than they had in the past, and have seen disciplines and colleges pledge to do more so that these women Ph.D.s can thrive in academic careers.

 

Conley said slow growth reflects the hiring and promotion process, in which deans and provosts drawn most often from the full professor ranks themselves make decisions about who become full professors next. That process isn’t about to change any time soon, she said, since a “core value” of higher education remains that only those who have achieved top faculty ranks should hold such authority.

 

But it can be counteracted by focusing more on developing diverse potential faculty talent at the graduate and even undergraduate levels, she said.

August 24, 2016 in Education, Equal Employment | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Book Review Symposium: Comments on "All the Single Ladies"

 

Signs, Short Takes: All the Single Ladies

Table of Contents

 Surveying the Singles Beat
Kate Bolick

 Ain’t We All Women?
Rebecca Carroll

 It’s Great to Be Young
Nancy F. Cott

 The Urgent Need for a Singles Studies Discipline
Bella DePaulo

 Great Stories about Ladies without Partners
Barbara J. Risman

 Our Work Is Never Done
Judith Stacey


 A Response
Rebecca Traister

August 23, 2016 in Books | Permalink | Comments (0)

Keeping Gender Front and Center and "In Sight"

Stephanie Wildman and Adam Chang, Gender In/Sight: Examining Culture and Constraints of Gender, Georgetown J. Gender & Law, forthcoming.

Abstract:     

To build supportive and inclusive communities, society needs to acknowledge gender and consider how gender dynamics influence daily interactions. Gender In/sight seeks both to provide deeper understandings of gender and underline the presence of gender in daily life, ensuring that gender is “in sight.”

According to Merriam-Webster’s on-line dictionary, “Gender is currently in the top 1% of look-upped words and is the 386th most popular word on Merriam-Webster.com.” These statistics suggest that many people are thinking about gender, yet past thinking most often considers gender an either/or binary with only two anatomical choices.

This paper begins by reviewing a brief evolution of the social construction of gender in U.S. society, followed by an elucidation of why the gender binary remains so problematic. It then introduces some frequently used and misused terms that comprise the cluster of “gender,” examining the question “What is Gender?” Sex has become synonymous with gender and gender with sex. Sex relates to biology, sex assigned at birth, genitalia, chromosomes, and hormones. Identity represents one’s innermost sense of self, whether male, female, both, neither, or any other identity. Most people develop a gender identity that comports with their biological sex. That person is cisgender. A transgender person’s gender identity does not match their assigned birth sex and often seeks to transition (socially or physically). Gender Expression describes the manner in which people outwardly demonstrate gender. A common misconception about gender lies in the belief that someone’s sexual orientation can be determined based on that person’s gender expression. Such an assumption is incomplete because it does not take into account culture, race, ethnicity, geography, and many other factors. A richer vocabulary provides a more holistic picture of the gender landscape including: drag, gender fluid, agender/gender neutral, sex assigned at birth, pansexual. The paper offers these terms not to be final and definitive, but rather to begin the gender conversation and to illustrate its complexity.

The paper next examines more closely recent attempts to expand understandings of gender and the barriers to inclusive gender equality. These barriers include a societal lack of familiarity with gender-expansive terms and language, resulting in the unintended exclusion of non-binary people as well as a rift between feminists and gender-expansive communities exemplified over the meanings associated with being genderblind. Deeper understanding of gender becomes further challenged by the failure to deconstruct binary definitions of gender and the absence of consistent identification of gender as a protected classification.

Finally the paper develops necessary elements for Gender In/sight, a daily practice of both seeing gender and making inclusive, community building decisions to broaden society’s understanding of gender minority people. This section introduces the elements of gender in/sight, which include (1) looking at context; (2) “asking the other question;” (3) examining privileges associated with gender and sexuality, such as male privilege, heterosexual privilege, and cisgender privilege, (4) “finding the me” in the gender conversation, and (5) rebuilding a gender framework that is inclusive while recognizing nuanced differences.

 

August 23, 2016 in Gender | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, August 22, 2016

CFP Center on Applied Feminism: Applied Feminism and Intersectionality

CALL FOR PAPERS

APPLIED FEMINISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY: 

EXAMINING LAW THROUGH THE LENS OF MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

The Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law seeks paper proposals for the Tenth Anniversary of the Feminist Legal Theory Conference.  We hope you will join us for this exciting celebration on March 30-31, 2017.

This year, the conference will explore how intersecting identities inform -- or should inform -- feminist legal theory and justice-oriented legal practice, legal systems, legal policy, and legal activism. Beginning in 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw identified the need for law to recognize persons as representing multiple intersecting identities, not only one identity (such as female) to the exclusion of another (such as African American). Intersectionality theory unmasks how social systems oppress people in different ways.  While its origins are in exploring the intersection of race and gender, intersectionality theory now encompasses all intersecting identities including religion, ethnicity, citizenship, class, disability, and sexual orientation. Today, intersectionality theory is an important part of the Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName movements. For more information, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/09/24/why-intersectionality-cant-wait/

We seek submissions of papers that focus on the topic of applied feminism and intersecting identities.  This conference aims to explore the following questions: What impact has intersectionality theory had on feminist legal theory?  How has it changed law and social policy? How does intersectionality help us understand and challenge different forms of oppression?  What is its transformative potential? What legal challenges are best suited to an intersectionality approach? How has intersectionality  theory changed over time and where might it go in the future?

We welcome proposals that consider these questions from a variety of substantive disciplines and perspectives. As always, the Center’s conference will serve as a forum for scholars, practitioners and activists to share ideas about applied feminism, focusing on connections between theory and practice to effectuate social change. The conference will be open to the public and will feature a keynote speaker. Past keynote speakers have included Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Dr. Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Amy Klobuchar, NOW President Terry O’Neill, EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum, and U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner.

To submit a paper proposal, please submit an abstract by Friday October 28, 2016 to [email protected]. Your abstract must contain your full contact information and professional affiliation, as well as an email, phone number, and mailing address. In the “Re” line, please state: CAF Conference 2017. Abstracts should be no longer than one page. We will notify presenters of selected papers in November. About half the presenter slots will be reserved for authors who commit to publishing in the annual symposium volume of the University of Baltimore Law Review. Thus, please indicate at the bottom of your abstract whether you are submitting (1) solely to present or (2) to present and publish in the symposium volume. Authors who are interested in publishing in the Law Review will be strongly considered for publication. For all presenters, working drafts of papers will be due no later than March 3, 2017. Presenters are responsible for their own travel costs; the conference will provide a discounted hotel rate as well as meals.

We look forward to your submissions. If you have further questions, please contact Prof. Margaret Johnson at [email protected]. For additional information about the conference, please visit law.ubalt.edu/caf.

August 22, 2016 in Call for Papers | Permalink | Comments (0)

CFP Law & Society Feminist Legal Theory Collaborative Research Network

Call for Papers – Friday September 16th Deadline

The Feminist Legal Theory Collaborative Research Network

Seeks submissions for the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting

Mexico City, Mexico, at the Sheraton Maria Isabel, June 20 – 23, 2017

Dear friends and colleagues,

We invite you to participate in the panels sponsored by the Feminist Legal Theory Collaborative Research Network at the Law and Society Annual Meeting in 2017. The Feminist Legal Theory CRN seeks to bring together law and society scholars across a range of fields who are interested in feminist legal theory. Information about the Law and Society meeting is available at http://www.lawandsociety.org.

This year’s meeting is unique in that it brings us to the Global South, and invites us to explore the theme Walls, Borders, and Bridges: Law and Society in an Inter-Connected World. We are especially interested in proposals that explore the application of feminist legal theory to this theme, broadly construed. This might include papers that explore feminist legal theory in comparative or transnational contexts, as well as in relation to the impacts of globalism and other intersections within particular locations, relationships, institutions, and identities. We are also interested in papers that will permit us to collaborate with other CRNs, such as the Critical Research on Race and the Law CRN, and welcome multidisciplinary proposals.

Our goal is to stimulate focused discussion of papers on which scholars are currently working. Thus, while you may submit papers that are closer to publication, we are particularly eager to receive proposals for works-in-progress that are at an earlier stage and will benefit from the discussion that the panels will provide.

The Planning Committee will assign individual papers to panels based on subject. Panels will use the LSA format, which requires four papers. We will also assign a chair, and one or two commentators/discussants for each panel, to provide feedback on the papers and promote discussion. For panels with two commentators/discussants, one may be asked to also chair.

As a condition of participating as a panelist, you must also agree to serve as a chair and/or commentator/discussant for another panel or participant. We will of course take into account expertise and topic preferences to the degree possible.

The duties of chairs are to organize the panel logistically; including registering it online with the LSA, and moderating the panel. Chairs will develop a 100-250 word description for the session and submit the session proposal to LSA before their anticipated deadline of October 19. This will ensure that each panelist can submit their proposal, using the panel number assigned.

The duties of commentator/discussants are to read the papers assigned to them and to prepare a short commentary about the papers that discusses them individually and (to the extent relevant) collectively, identifying ways that they relate to one another.

If you would like to present a paper as part of a CRN panel, please email:

  • An 1000 word abstract or summary,
  • Your name and a title, and
  • A list of your areas of interest and expertise within feminist legal theory

to the CRN Planning Committee at [email protected]. (Please do not send submissions to individual committee members.)

Note that LSA is imposing a requirement that your summary be at least 1,000 words long.  Although a shorter summary will suffice for our purposes, you will be required to upload a 1,000 word summary in advance of LSA’s anticipated deadline of October 19. If you are already planning a LSA session with at least four panelists (and papers) that you would like to see included in the Feminist Legal Theory CRN, please let the Committee know.

In addition to these panels, we may try to use some of the other formats that the LSA provides: the “author meets readers” format, salon, or roundtable discussion. If you have an idea that you think would work well in one of these formats, please let us know. Please note that for roundtables, organizers are now required to provide a 500-word summary of the topic and the contributions they expect the proposed participants to make. Please also note that LSA rules limit you to participating only once as a paper panelist or roundtable participant.

Please submit all proposals by Friday, September 16 to the email provided above. This will permit us to organize panels and submit them prior to the LSA’s anticipated deadline of October 19. In the past, we have accommodated as many panelists as possible, but have been unable to accept all proposals. If we are unable to accept your proposal for the CRN, we will notify you by early October so that you can submit an independent proposal to LSA.

We hope you’ll join us in Mexico City to share and discuss the scholarship in which we are all engaged and connect with others doing work on feminist legal theory.

Best,

2017 LSA Feminist Legal Theory CRN Planning Committee

Aziza Ahmed (co-chair)

Elizabeth MacDowell (co-chair)

Jamie Abrams

Srimati Basu

Cyra Akila Choudhury

Anibal Rosario-Lebron

August 22, 2016 in Call for Papers, Conferences | Permalink | Comments (0)

An Interview with Anita Hill: Sexual Harassment is "Now Part of the Public Conversation"

NPR, We've Come a Long Way Since Then

Nearly 25 years after Anita Hill accused her former boss Clarence Thomas — then a Supreme Court nominee — of making lewd advances, the fight against sexual harassment is again in the spotlight.

 

Women are pushing to change policies at colleges across the country. Bill Cosby — once a beloved figure of American culture — is now widely reviled because of accusations of rape and assault.

 

More recently, more than 20 women say media mogul Roger Ailes harassed them at work.

 

It's a familiar story now: accusations of powerful men using their positions of authority to take advantage of younger women.

 

Anita Hill was one of the first to capture that narrative in her testimony on Capitol Hill in 1991. She accused Thomas of sexual harassment. He denied all wrongdoing. She was ostracized.

"We've come a long way since then," Hill tells Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep. "It is now part of the public conversation."

 

Hill, now a professor at Brandeis University, says that while women have fought sexual harassment cases in court and won, "even among women who seem very powerful in their jobs and in the public eye, these problems exist and they don't come forward necessarily.

August 22, 2016 in Equal Employment | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, August 19, 2016

Justice Dept Files Suit Alleging Unequal Pay for Female Coach

Justice Department Files Lawsuit Against New Mexico State University Alleging Discrimination

The Justice Department announced today that it has filed a lawsuit alleging that New Mexico State University and its Board of Regents (NMSU) discriminated against a female former assistant track coach on the basis of sex by paying her less than similarly-situated men in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 

The Justice Department’s complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico and alleges that, over the relevant periods of time, NMSU paid Meaghan Harkins thousands of dollars less per year than it paid to two male assistant track coaches with similar responsibilities, in violation of Title VII.  Title VII is a federal statute that prohibits employment discrimination – including discrimination in compensation – on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin and religion.

 

“Women deserve the same salary and the same respect as their male colleagues with similar job duties,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.  “Lawsuits like this one demonstrate the Justice Department’s steadfast commitment to enforcing federal law to close the wage gap.”

August 19, 2016 in Equal Employment, Sports | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Women Prosecutors File Discrimination Claims, But They are Hard to Win

ABA J, Female Former Prosecutor Files Pay Bias Suit

A former county prosecutor in Vermont has filed a federal lawsuit claiming she was paid about $14,000 less per year than a male prosecutor in the same position.

 

Lawyer Jane O’Neill sued the Rutland County State’s Attorneys office in a suit filed last month, the Burlington Free Press reports.

 

O’Neill says she was told her salary was not negotiable when she was hired, and she got no answers when she asked about the pay of the male colleague who was hired in 2011. She also claims her boss assigned her lesser tasks and tried to marginalize her in retaliation for her questions.

 

The suit also claims O’Neill regularly worked 50 to 60 hours a week, but did not get compensation for the extra hours.

 

O’Neill says she resigned in mid-2014 because working conditions had become intolerable.

See also US Jury Rejects Discrimination Complaint Against Suffolk District Attorney

A federal jury . . .  rejected a former state prosecutor’s claims that she was paid less than her male counterparts in the Suffolk district attorney’s office because she is a woman.

 

In a unanimous decision, the jury of six women and two men also disagreed with Christina Corda’s claims that her termination from the office was based on her complaints of discrimination. Corda, 34, had filed a lawsuit against the Suffolk district attorney’s office in March 2015. But in a sweeping verdict Thursday, the jury rejected her claims of discrimination, of retaliation, and of violations of state and federal equal pay laws.

See also Ex-Federal Prosecutor Files Sex Bias Suit Against DOJ

A former deputy criminal chief for theU.S. Attorney’s Office in Spokane, Washington, filed a scathing sex discrimination and equal pay lawsuit against the U.S. Justice Department, claiming she was treated differently by male colleagues and ultimately forced to resign.

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Katherine Jill Bolton claims she was unfairly put on administrative leave by Michael C. Ormsby, U.S. Attorney for Eastern District of Washington, after he learned she obtained information showing a discrepancy in salaries between her and similarly situated male colleagues. Ormsby characterized Bolton’s actions as a “data breach” and made criminal allegations against her, but another U.S. attorney’s office declined to file charges, her complaint says.

August 18, 2016 in Equal Employment, Women lawyers | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Universities Challenge Education Dept's Title IX Guidance

Chronicle, Oklahoma Wesleyan Joins Lawsuit Challenging Education Dept's Title IX Guidance

Oklahoma Wesleyan University is joining a former University of Virginia student’s lawsuit challenging the Title IX guidance of the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, according to court documents filed Monday.

 

The university joins the plaintiff, identified in the lawsuit as John Doe, who was found responsible for sexual misconduct. The lawsuit asserts that the student was found responsible only because the department’s standard of proof is so low.

 

The suit raises objections to the department’s “Dear Colleague” letter, which states that colleges should use a “preponderance of evidence” standard when reviewing sexual-violence complaints.

 

“A growing number of innocent students have been trampled in the wake of these new requirements, found responsible for serious charges based often on the flimsiest of evidence,” the suit reads.

August 17, 2016 in Education, Violence Against Women | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sexism at the Olympics

Literally Just a List of Sexist Things Which Have Happened at the Olympics for Far

Because there’s nothing like the Olympic Games to remind women that we are inferior by patronising female athletes for the world to see at every given opportunity. Here’s a comprehensive guide to the most sexist things that have happened thus far.

 

The commodification of the female body started before the athletes even arrived in Rio, with the host nation promising it to have the “sexiest ever” opening ceremony with “lots of nearly naked women doing the samba”, as opposed to celebrating the masses of world-class athletes that would be competing.

 

However, according to NBC’s chief marketing official John Miller, this is just catering to the games’ female audience who are “less interested in the result and more interested in the journey. It’s sort of like the ultimate reality show and miniseries wrapped into one”.

 

And NBC didn’t stop there. They’ve made demeaning comments about the USA women’s gymnastics team – after dominating the qualifications for the all round team medal, the ‘final five’ were discussing their performance, to which one commentator said “they might as well be standing in the middle of a mall”, attempting to take away the power of arguably the most formidable team in Olympic gymnastics history.

Olympic Men Stand Up to Sexism Too--Because That's Not Just Women's Work

Feminism! Fairness! Equality! These are not concepts that affect women alone. But boy, do we get tired of carrying the expectation that they are. So a big “Well done, gentlemen,” to Andy Murray and Adam van Koeverden, two male athletes who this week took a stand against sexist assumptions.

August 17, 2016 in Pop Culture, Sports | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, August 12, 2016

Book Review: Women in Early America

Zoe Detsi, Review, European J. American Studies, Thomas A. Foster, ed. Women in Early America (NYU Press 2015)

Women in Early America is an intriguing collection of essays offering richly diverse readings of women’s lives and experiences in 17th- and 18th- century America. This volume is a significant contribution to the scholarship concerning the role of women in history and their participation in historical moments of political change and cultural negotiation. From Gerda Lerner’s seminal work on The Woman in American History (1971) to Linda Kerber’s enlightening book titled Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (6th ed., 2004), to Mary Beth Norton’s meticulous transatlantic study Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (2011), scholarly efforts have been made to deepen our understanding of women’s history by initiating a shift of focus from their domestic role and dependent status to their active involvement in political, military, and economic affairs, as well as cultural production.

 

The scope of the volume’s methodological approach to the history of early women in America is very broad. The essays cover an impressive range of women’s experiences from the colonial period to the American revolutionary war offering a number of perspectives that embrace cultural history, gender theory, race studies, while resenting a multitude of women’s voices from different social, cultural, political, ethnic backgrounds, and geographical areas. All eleven essays provide scholars and researchers with a wealth of archival material – diaries, letters, narratives, documents – and with fresh insights into examining women in history as active agents in their own right challenging social conventions and political decisions. Either as aristocratic women in New Mexico or indentured servants in Virginia and Maryland, as slave owners in Jamaica or runaway slaves, as interpreters in Puritan Massachusetts or traders in  French America and Detroit, as Loyalist women during the revolution or proponents of female education in the new nation, early women in America were deeply involved in (inter)cultural practices and greatly affected by economic policies and social changes.

The Table of Contents is here.

August 12, 2016 in Books, Legal History | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Reconstructing Pregnancy

Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo,Reconstructing Pregnancy, 69 SMU L.Rev. (2016)

Abstract:     

Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978 to amend Title VII's prohibition against sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions. More than thirty-five years after the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, courts have failed to fulfill that act's promise. This failure lies, in part, in the law's tendency to reduce pregnancy, with all of its social and cultural meaning, to its "purely" biological elements. For the purposes of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, courts ground the legal conception of pregnancy in a form of biomedical essentialism that treats pregnancy as a universal given. Under the PDA, courts have reduced pregnancy discrimination only to the discrimination that occurs during gestation or because of gestation-related physiological conditions. This reductive definition of pregnancy is not only profoundly under-inclusive and unresponsive to the needs of workers but also contradictory and incoherent. In response, this article proposes that pregnancy should be reconstructed in law. Judges, administrative actors, and advocates should reject reductive forms of biomedical essentialism and embrace possibilities beyond biology. Pregnancy should not, and indeed cannot, be understood independent of the social, cultural, and relational interactions that give it meaning. Pregnancy is, in fact, pregnant with social and cultural meaning. Reconstructing pregnancy in this way has the potential to provide much needed clarity to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and to ensure that pregnancy discrimination is comprehensively prohibited -- whether it occurs before, during, or after conception.

 

 

August 11, 2016 in Pregnancy | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Criminalizing Pregnancy

Cortney Lollar, Criminalizing Pregnancy, Indiana L.J.

Abstract:     

The state of Tennessee arrested a woman two days after she gave birth and charged her with assault of her newborn child based on her use of narcotics during her pregnancy. Tennessee’s 2014 assault statute was the first to explicitly criminalize the use of drugs by a pregnant woman. But this law, along with others like it being considered by legislatures across the country, is only the most recent manifestation of a long history of using criminal law to punish poor mothers and mothers of color for their behavior while pregnant. The purported motivation for such laws is the harm to the child from prenatal exposure to illegal drugs. But recent scientific studies undermine the harm narrative.

This Article is the first to take a close look at the science behind these laws. Recent longitudinal studies confirm that the use of illegal drugs while pregnant, in and of itself, rarely results in long-term adverse consequences to the fetus and subsequent child. Meanwhile, the negative consequences of ingesting licit substances such as tobacco, alcohol, and other lawfully-prescribed medications, often are much greater than the potential undesirable effects of drug use. Poverty, domestic violence, and a father’s behavior prior to conception also have been shown to have significant harmful impacts on fetal development. Although the criminalization of drug use by pregnant women does not prevent impairment of the fetus and subsequent child, it often leads to additional detrimental consequences. The state regularly steps in and removes children born to women using illicit drugs while pregnant, even when there is no evidence of harm to the child and despite the documented harms to newborns from placement in the foster care system. Additionally, as every major medical organization has publicly indicated, pregnant women are less likely to seek prenatal care if they fear arrest for using drugs, creating damaging effects greater than any potential harms from the drug use.

Legislatures’ unwillingness to acknowledge the empirical evidence contradicting the rationales for this latest batch of criminal laws might cause one to wonder whether the harm to the child is truly the motivating impetus behind these laws. The existing statutes have a disproportionate impact on poor mothers and mothers of color. In fact, class and race-based constructions of motherhood go a significant distance toward explaining the presence of these laws. This Article analyzes how our current approach to the use of drugs by pregnant women relies on these troubling economic- and race-based social constructions, rather than on any scientific and empirical evidence. By challenging the erroneous presumptions motivating these laws, this Article hopes to move legislatures toward effectively addressing the more substantial risks to developing fetuses.

 

 

August 10, 2016 in Pregnancy | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Expanding the Concept of Pregnancy Discrimination

Joanna L. Grossman, Expanding the Core: Pregnancy Discrimination Law as it Approaches Full Term, 52 Idaho L.Rev. (2016)

Abstract:     

The advocates behind the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) of 1978 had one very specific mission: to override the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in General Electric v. Gilbert, in which it had curiously held that pregnancy discrimination had nothing to do with gender and was thus not a form of actionable sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court was not acting on a blank slate; it had used the same reasoning two years earlier to hold, in Geduldig v. Aiello, that pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination for equal protection purposes and therefore was not a classification that merited heightened judicial scrutiny. But the ruling in Gilbert was more than insult to injury. It was both surprising — ignoring a contrary interpretation by the EEOC, as well as rulings of several federal appellate courts that had agreed with the EEOC — and devastating — leaving in place the widespread employer policies that kept pregnant women out of some jobs altogether, and out of continuous employment at almost every job.

The response to Gilbert was swift and effective. The Campaign to End Discrimination Against Pregnant Workers mobilized support for a new law that would amend Title VII, expressly prohibiting pregnancy discrimination. But the specific mission to obtain a legislative override of the Gilbert decision was animated by a more general goal — to ensure pregnant women were not left behind as the tide of employee benefits and accommodations was rising. The fear of being left behind was firmly rooted in reality — workers across the country were benefiting from a rising tide of benefits, while pregnancy was being routinely omitted from comprehensive benefit plans, and pregnant workers found themselves singled out for adverse treatment. Employers refused to hire pregnant women; forced pregnant employees to stop work at a certain point in pregnancy and prevented them from returning to work until a certain point after childbirth; and expressly excluded pregnancy from otherwise comprehensive insurance, disability and leave policies. All told, this meant that pregnant women had little hope of reasonable access to the workforce, and no hope of full integration into it.

The PDA was immediately effective in eliminating most formal employer policies that singled out pregnancy for different (and typically worse) treatment. Congress gave pregnant women the right to be treated like everyone else — allowed to work if they were fully able to work and allowed to take leave if it was otherwise available.8 But these core rights, while important, even essential, are not enough to bring about true equality for women. Thus, as the PDA approaches forty, we see a sustained effort to expand on those core rights. In some cases, the “expansion” is simply a matter of pushing courts to give the PDA its due, reading in a way that furthers Congress’s intent rather than undermines it. In others, the expansion would go beyond the existing statutory rights, as necessary to bring about not only women’s access to the workplace, but their integration into it. After setting out the core of pregnancy discrimination law, this essay will develop four expansion themes: (1) from pregnancy alone to the whole reproductive process, including the “maternal wall”; (2) from overt to implicit bias; (3) from status to effects (and thus access to accommodation); and (4) from federal to state and local protections.

 

August 9, 2016 in Pregnancy | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, August 8, 2016

Book: Irish Feminist Judgments Project

Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments Project: Judges' Troubles and the Gendered Politics of Identity (forthcoming 2017)

The Irish project Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments: Judges' Troubles and the Gendered Politics of Identity builds upon the work of the feminist judgment project completed at Durham and Kent and which integrated feminist theory and judicial method, re-writing influential judgments from feminist perspectives. The project will produce an anthology of re-written judgments from Northern/Ireland as well as innovative web resources with materials of use to both academics and civil society. Bringing together academic partners at institutions across the UK and Ireland including the Law Schools at Kent, LSE, UCD, UCC, Queen's Belfast, and the University of Ulster, with solicitors, barristers and civil society groups, the project creates a broad new community of Irish feminist scholars around an ambitious Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments Project. The project will create tangible resources which can be used to engender a societal dialogue about legal decision-making and social change, developing dynamic resources for future research and teaching in judicial studies. The project focuses on the gendered political roles of judges in contexts of transition from conflict, colonialism and religious patriarchy.

August 8, 2016 in Books, Courts, International | Permalink | Comments (0)