Harvard Women’s Law Association Conference

Panels

Health & Equality

There is a burgeoning awareness that access to health care is an equality issue.  With inadequate resources to access basic health services, women around the globe are impaired from functioning at the highest level.  At the same time, health disparities perpetuate other disparities, leaving women who lack these resources behind their counterparts elsewhere.  Women’s reproductive health needs make this question all the more stark.  Our panel brings together leading experts in legal and nonlegal fields, who have a holistic perspective on health that grounds legal answers in community-based approaches.

Equality & Economics

Economic inequality influences people’s choices and shapes their worldviews.  As such, it is necessary to continually interrogate the changing role of women in the economy. This panel brings together women who have broken through social and cultural barriers to begin to equalize economic environments.  Coming from different fields in the public and private sector, each panelist has a unique perspective on what it means to equalize the workplace, as well as the broader economy.

Equality on Both Sides of the Bench

Women represent a rapidly rising percentage of litigators and judges.  However, courtrooms remain one of the least gender-balanced arenas.  In this panel, we have brought together leading judges and litigators who have been experience in breaking through inequality on both sides of the bench. We hope that a conversation between litigators and judges will lead to a broad and fruitful discussion about what it means to be a woman in the courtroom, and how we can work to build off of their foundational work to eliminate gender discrimination in courtroom settings.

Equality for Girls

When envisioning the future we want to see, it is imperative to think about how the next generation of women will be educated and nurtured.  Continual efforts to eliminate gender discrimination in the schools and on the streets for girls around the world represent the best chance to positively affect the change we wish to see.  Our girls panel brings together the women who are doing exactly this: influencing the lives of young women around the globe through legal, social, economic, and cultural means.

More details here.

Negotiating the Situation

Lu-in Wang,  has posted an intriguing situationist paper, titled “Negotiating the Situation: The Reasonable Person in Context ” (forthcoming Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 14, p. 1285, 2010) on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract.

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This Essay argues that our understanding of the reasonable person in economic transactions should take into account an individual’s race, gender, or other group-based identity characteristics – not necessarily because persons differ on account of those characteristics, but because of how those characteristics influence the situations a person must negotiate. That is, individuals’ social identities constitute features not just of themselves, but also of the situations they inhabit. In economic transactions that involve social interaction, such as face-to-face negotiations, the actor’s race, gender, or other social identity can affect both an individual actor and those who interact with him or her, because those characteristics often create expectations, based largely on group-based stereotypes, that influence the parties on both sides of the transaction. Individuals’ social identities thereby can influence their constraints and incentives, and accordingly their choices, behavior, and outcomes.

This Essay offers a couple of well-known examples of the influence of social stereotypes on individuals’ choices, behavior, and outcomes in economic transactions. It then provides a more extended examination of the effect of social identity on economic transactions by drawing upon a recent, growing, and fascinating area of social psychological research into the effect of gender on negotiations. The findings of this research are both disturbing and promising: disturbing because they show that stereotypes can influence the behavior of both women and men in negotiations, to the detriment of women, even if the individuals do not believe the stereotypes to be true, and that stereotypes can interact with other features of the situation to aggravate their tendency to promote unequal outcomes. The findings are promising as well, however, because they also show that gender stereotypes can be moderated or even counteracted by yet other features of the situation. Appreciating the situation-altering yet situation-sensitive influence of social identities such as gender provides us with a richer understanding of the circumstances in which people interact and shows that, sometimes, common economic transactions take place in different places for different people.

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Download the paper for free here.

Related Situationist posts:

• “The Gendered Situation of Recommendation Letters.”
• “Not Just Whistling Vivaldi,”
• “Women’s Situational Bind,”
• “Performing Under Pressure,”
• “Social Psychologists Discuss Stereotype Threat,”
• “Stereotype Threat and Performance,” and
• “No Contract for Old Men.”

Even monkeys know when they’re being treated unfairly

In the video below the jump, primate expert Frans de Waal explores the effect of unequal rewards on behavior.

A Discussion about (In)Equality

The following (51 minute) video contains a worthwhile discussion from Agenda about how much inequality is too much.

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Participants Include:

Richard Wilkinson is co-author of The Spirit Level and Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham Medical School and honorary professor at University College London. He has played a formative role in international research and his work has been published in 10 languages. He studied economic history at the London School of Economics before training in epidemiology.

William Watson is the Chair of the Economic Department at McGill University.

Lane Kenworthy is a sociologist at the University of Arizona where he studies the causes and consequences of poverty, inequality, mobility, employment, economic growth, and social policy in the United States and other affluent countries.

Bob Rae is the Liberal foreign affairs critic, MP for Toronto Centre, and a former premier of Ontario. Visit bobrae.ca.

Sylvia Bashevkin is principal of University College, and a professor in the Department of Political Science, at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Toeing the Lines: Women and Party Politics in English Canada.

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For a sample of related Stiuationist posts, see “The Situational Effects of (In)Equality,” “The Situational Consequences of Poverty on Brains,” “Inequality and the Unequal Situation of Mental and Physical Health,” “The Interior Situation of Intergenerational Poverty,” “Rich Brains, Poor Brains?,” “Jeffrey Sachs on the Situation of Global Poverty,” “The Situation of Financial Risk-Taking,” “The Situation of Standardized Test Scores,” “The Toll of Discrimination on Black Women,” “The Physical Pains of Discrimination,” “The Depressing Effects of Racial Discrimination,” and “The Cognitive Costs of Interracial Interactions.”

The Situational Effects of (In)Equality

Here is an intriguing (40-minute) interview with Richard Wilkinson co-author of the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger and co-founder of The Equality Trust.

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For a sample of related Stiuationist posts, see “The Situational Consequences of Poverty on Brains,” For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Inequality and the Unequal Situation of Mental and Physical Health,” “The Interior Situation of Intergenerational Poverty,” “Rich Brains, Poor Brains?,” “Jeffrey Sachs on the Situation of Global Poverty,” “The Situation of Financial Risk-Taking,” “The Situation of Standardized Test Scores,” “The Toll of Discrimination on Black Women,” “The Physical Pains of Discrimination,” “The Depressing Effects of Racial Discrimination,” and “The Cognitive Costs of Interracial Interactions.”

The Legal Situation of Race Equality – Abstract

Ivan Bodensteiner has posted his paper, “The Supreme Court as the Major Barrier to Racial Equality” on SSRN. Here’s the abstract.

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This Article suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court, through its decisions in cases alleging race discrimination, stands as a major barrier to racial equality in the United States. There are several aspects of its decisions that lead to this result. Between 1868 and 1954, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, while it had been interpreted to strike down a few blatant forms of de jure discrimination, allowed government to separate the races based on the separate but equal fiction. Beginning in 1954, Brown and a series of subsequent decisions attacked this fiction and for a period of nearly twenty years the Court was intent on eliminating the vestiges of segregation in the schools, approving broad remedial orders. This changed drastically beginning in 1974 when the Court began limiting the available remedies and relieving school systems of the burdens imposed by court orders. Around the same time, the Court decided that equal protection plaintiffs needed to show a discriminatory governmental purpose in order to trigger meaningful constitutional protection. This meant that facially neutral laws and practices with discriminatory effects were largely constitutional.

Beginning with Bakke in 1978, the Court made it difficult, and eventually nearly impossible, for government to take affirmative steps designed to promote equality. A majority of the Court determined that invidious and benign racial classifications should be treated the same under the Equal Protection Clause, with both subjected to strict scrutiny. This completed the Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in a manner that makes it a real barrier to racial equality: government is free to engage in invidious discrimination as long as it masks the real purpose, and affirmative steps designed by government to promote equality will be struck down as a violation of equal protection. Ironically, the constitutional amendment designed to promote freedom and equality for the newly-freed slaves now stands in the way of true freedom and equality.