I can't help but think that Rob's example of the female judge's comments point to a vicious cycle. As a lot of people have been discussing, there is a perceived problem of how to balance femininity with aggressiveness. The women that succeed in the law often tend to be the aggressive ones that play 'the man's game' well, and as such once they get to the higher levels they look for other women who do the same. Thus, only the women who play the game can climb the ladder, even once other women are already there, because the women that are there are looking for the same aggressive qualities which allowed them to succeed.

To me, the problem is why the 'right' amount of aggressiveness is the standard. In contracts last semester, we talked about the idea that the law does not need to be such an adversarial system, but could be more cooperative, a model promulgated by feminist legal scholars. The question then becomes why there is an assumption that the man's way of doing it is what the woman needs to emulate (as others have discussed, a difficult thing to do), and how to overcome that presumption. How to do it I have no idea- it seems like the law fits into Veblen's primitive society, where some work becomes men's work and others women's work (with law, like any other fighting, traditionally being men's). How do we turn what was considered 'men's' work into gender-neutral work, where the tendencies of one gender are as acceptable as the other? And even if we could level the playing field as lawyers so that 'going for the jugular' was not necessarily the expectation, how would litigators overcome the jury's tendency to find the aggressive male norms more persuasive than the cooperative female norms because of wider societal expectations? (FYI- I know plenty of women will say they do not meet these norms, but I'm just using the limited knowledge I have of feminist legal scholarship so please correct me if I'm wrong)

-- RorySkaggs - 22 Apr 2010