Media and Journalism, Sexism

Some Sexist Bullsh*t On This Website

An article on ATL panders to the shock (and fear) that maybe someday soon the legal system might have more women than men running it.

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fight the powerHi there. It’s me. Your neighborhood lovable ATL editor. We have to talk. See, there was some bullshit on our site yesterday. One of our columnists, Keith Lee, wrote some patently sexist shit, and I just can’t deal with it.

Perhaps Lee didn’t expect for his article to read as offensively as it does. But for my $.02, that only makes it worse. If “good” folks can reinscribe and fan the flames of this kind of demeaning and sexist rhetoric, without realizing it, it only demonstrates the pernicious nature of the power dynamics at play.

Maybe you saw it, an article purporting to be about the latest law school numbers. The big headline is that “smart” undergrads — i.e., those who attended elite undergraduate institutions, both men and women I’ll add, for reasons that will become apparent later — have stopped applying to law schools. Disappointing, certainly, for those in the legal profession, but with rising tuition costs, the increased volatility in legal jobs, and the boring nature of the bulk of legal work, this isn’t (or shouldn’t be) much of a surprise. But that isn’t how the article chose to report it. No, it went a different route.

Smart Kids Stay Away From Law School, Girls Take Over

That’s just a whole lotta “what the fuck” right there.

First of all, “girls”? No, there aren’t a bunch of 8-year-old female children entering law school. It is just a paternalistic and demeaning way to refer to women, all generally in the 22+ age range, who’ve decided to go the law school route. And there is not a single instance in the post (let alone in the title) where Lee refers to law school-bound men as “boys.” I know there are some readers out there who will snort and roll their eyes about this complaint, but women making career choices, like deciding to attend law school, should not be infantilized. God knows the student loan companies aren’t going to treat them like children, so maybe you should pump the brakes, too.

Secondly, do you see how the implied subject — the smart kids — are male? The title implies that in the absence of smart men to take the seats in law school, the schools are forced to turn to women to fill the seats and they are necessarily dumber than those (men) that are turning down law school. The smart guys have to say no in order to let women in the door — never mind that those same statistics reveal smart women (or at least the ones from the undergraduate institutions that are deemed elite) are also turning down law school.

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Which brings us to this nifty transition:

And as the smart kids stay away…

Law Schools Turn Pink

“Law Schools Turn Pink”?? Are you kidding me? Haven’t we evolved beyond the trite, binary BS? All girls like pink, and boys are in blue! Give me a break. Granted, this website has used the term for articles about the pervasive mistreatment women are subjected to in the legal profession, but there is something about reclaiming a term and inverting the meaning that is frankly not present in Lee’s article.

And don’t get me started on this line, or the stereotypical .gif that ends Lee’s post:

That’s right, girls just wanna have…law school?

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But more to the point, even if the smarty pantses were going to law school, there is still a likelihood that incoming classes would tend to be more female since more women are going to college than men. And a bachelor’s degree is, of course, a prerequisite for law school.

The Washington Post is just one of many publications that has noted this phenomenon:

Women today get the majority of college degrees in America. It doesn’t matter what kind — associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral — women beat men in all the categories. In the 2009-2010 academic year, women earned 57.4 percent of all bachelor’s degrees.

And there are competing theories as to why that is true:

That’s from a discussion in a 2006 paper on the college gender gap by economists Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz and Ilyana Kuziemko. “A more level and wider playing field for girls enabled them to blossom,” they write. “At the same time, the slower social development and more serious behavioral problems of boys remained and allowed girls to leapfrog over boys in the race to college.”

In other words: As things got more equal for boys and girls, a natural advantage began to reveal itself.

Another theory postulates that a greater variety of career options for women over men has led to men opting out of college altogether:

Recently, Elisa Olivieri, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, put forth a different explanation for why women are so much better at graduating college. Perhaps, she says, it has to do with the different kinds of careers that men and women want.

…

By Olivieri’s calculations, the biggest obstacle keeping men out of college might be their own squeamishness about certain gendered jobs. They may have to change their minds soon. The returns from a bachelor’s degree are on the rise. And while traditionally male jobs like manufacturing have been disappearing, traditionally female jobs like nursing are in high demand.

But none of them are that men have suddenly decided to step aside and let “chicks” dominate the industry. So maybe, regardless of the average LSAT scores of a law school incoming class, women are still mostly likely to dominate there too.

The article, and the headline, panders to the shock (and fear) that maybe someday soon the legal system might have more women than men running it. In this moment, instead of getting angry, I choose to recall the words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.

Women are dominating men at college. Blame sexism. [Washington Post]

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