Law Schools

America’s Care Crisis Is Exploding And Women Lawyers Are Being Forced To Pick Up The Pieces

The time and space needed for research and writing is nearly impossible to carve out. The loss of women’s scholarship may reshape legal academia. Gains made over decades may be lost.

By Shruti Rana and Cyra Akila Choudhury  
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(Image via Getty)

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Professors Shruti Rana and Cyra Akila Choudhury to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.

As summer comes to a close, America’s COVID-19 care crisis is about to explode. Lawyer moms — who in our view encompass all women lawyers with caregiving roles — are accustomed to high-wire juggling acts. Yet as workplaces reopen while schools, childcare, and elder care remain dangerous or inaccessible, the safety net beneath us is crumbling at the very time we need it most. While most of us struggled through spring lockdowns patching together care duties and work, none of us were prepared for an extended period of juggling all of these responsibilities from our homes. For law professors in these circumstances, producing research and scholarship may be a low priority, with the potential for lasting detrimental effects on the profession as a whole.

As law professors, administrators, and caregivers, we have a unique perspective on how this crisis is affecting women in the legal field. We see how the pandemic is affecting women entering the profession, whether they are seeking entrance to law school, finding their way in law school, or leaving law school and seeking bar admission or trying to break barriers in the profession. At the same time, we are lawyer moms ourselves, fighting for a place in legal academia and for recognition and acceptance in a field that remains inhospitable to women, especially women further marginalized by race or other factors.

While balancing these roles has always been difficult due to the lack of adequate family support such as paid parental leave, we believe family care has reached a crisis level because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pressure on women faculty is further multiplied by the structural changes that have followed, such as the move to online and remote teaching for some but in-person teaching for others. Women faculty, especially junior, untenured women, report feeling pressured to teach in-person classes with inadequate safety precautions, while faculty in already precarious contingent roles fear being pushed out of academia entirely due to health or caregiving issues exacerbated by a lack of meaningful institutional support. Female law professors of all ages report that their already disproportionate service and care responsibilities to students have also increased with the shift to online learning, as faculty have become the primary link between students and their schools and as the pandemic increases the stressors on students, staff, and faculty. Compounding these pressures, black faculty and faculty of color more generally have also been coping with the emotional effects of the police killings of George Floyd and others, at the same time that COVID-19’s health effects are concentrating along lines of race and inequality. Women faculty who teach or research about these topics are further subject to online harassment, zoombombing, and other forms of targeting and discrimination.

Women are being forced to make tough decisions about how to allocate their time and resources. Scholarship by and about women may be the first ball to drop. We are already seeing reports from other disciplines indicating drops in the number of submissions by women to journals. “The Lily” reports that in some fields, since the shutdowns began, the rate of submission by men has risen by 50% while women’s submission rate has fallen. Women law professors have reported to us that for them, as for other women juggling caregiving and research, the time and space needed for research and writing is nearly impossible to carve out. It is very likely that the law review submission cycle that has just begun will see a drop in submissions by women scholars. Moreover, we expect that this will cascade into future submission cycles. Without attention and intervention by law reviews and our academic institutions, the loss of women’s scholarship may reshape legal academia. Gains made over decades may be lost.

And this loss is significant. While service work like mentoring junior faculty and students is important, scholarship results in promotion and advancement in the field. Furthermore, women’s scholarship and knowledge production is important in and of itself. The visibility of women scholars sends important messages to students and the profession, not just about the role of women faculty but also about the issues women highlight in their work. Losing women’s voices would alter the landscape of legal thought and public discourse, as well as the makeup of a profession that has only gotten used to the presence of women in appreciable numbers in the past 30 years.

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Now is the time for law schools and law reviews to show their commitment to gender equity. In our recent letter to law reviews and law schools, co-authored by several women faculty, we encourage institutions to work creatively with women faculty. Law reviews can take note of the gender balance of their issues and publish shorter and co-authored work. Law schools have already worked to extend the tenure clock for some affected faculty. We encourage them to keep the disparate impact of caregiving in mind and to not penalize women faculty who may meet the stated standards for promotion and tenure even if they, at this moment, cannot exceed them. Just as women’s entrance into the legal profession improved it, support for women faculty benefits us all, especially students and future lawyers.

Shruti Rana (Photo by Steve Exum of exumphoto.com)

Cyra Akila Choudhury

Shruti Rana is Assistant Dean and professor of international law at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University Bloomington; Cyra Akila Choudhury is Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law. Published with contributions from Professor Jennifer Hendricks. The letter referenced above was co-authored by Cyra Akila Choudhury, Meera Deo, Angelique Eaglewoman, Jennifer Hendricks, Saru Matambanadzo-Noble, Shruti Rana, and Maybell Romero.

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