This is a long-overdue final post to conclude my stint as a guest-blogger about my book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court here at the Faculty Lounge. (See this link for prior posts.)
Since I last posted, we’ve witnessed the confirmation of a fifth woman for the Supreme Court and the first female Vice President of color will take her oath office in less than a month. These are moments of progress toward gender equality in leadership roles, to be sure. (Though it’s notable that Justice Amy Coney Barrett was questioned about laundry during her Senate confirmation hearings and soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris is already battling racist/sexist tropes according to a media study from TIME’S UP.)
And yet in the same span of time we also witnessed heightened resistance to women in power, including the taking-down of Dr. Jill Biden for using the same title that men holding PhDs do without any commentary or question, and the threatened kidnapping and murder of Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer for making decisions similar to New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo. As Fast Company put it in the recent article Whitmer & Cuomo: A Case Study in American Sexism: “Very different responses to the leadership of two prominent governors during the COVID-19 crisis reveals a lot about misogyny in America.”
Another continued tension is whether a woman is “right” for a particular role. Some might say that my early support for Barrett’s placement on the Supreme Court is in contradiction to my advocacy for women’s rights. (Together with my co-author Hannah Brenner Johnson we penned an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle back in 2018 calling for Trump to select Barrett when instead he chose Brett Kavanaugh. Then, in 2020 we authored two additional pieces (at CNN and the New York Daily News) conveying concerns about whether Barrett would support women’s rights in the same way as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) Maybe this seems contradictory, but they are both positions we hold as compatible. White men have had a wide range of social, moral, and political beliefs represented on the Court and in all areas of leadership since the founding of this nation. Why shouldn’t women? Real progress, we believe, comes from supporting gender equality in leadership without expecting one (or a handful) of women to represent all things to all women.
When Hannah and I finished writing the manuscript for Shortlisted in late 2018, we were struck by how so much of the discrimination and prejudice women endured nearly a century ago as they navigated professional lives remains today, especially for positions at the top. We channeled our frustration about this into another book, one designed especially to be used in law schools and higher education for courses on leadership. Gender, Power, Law & Leadership (West Academic 2019) is not a typical leadership book, in that it does not offer guidance on how to lead (though to be sure there are many important lessons from the individuals profiled). Instead, we focus on how to dismantle the structural barriers to gender equality in leadership, barriers that fall especially harsh on women of color. The book exposes readers to intersections of gender, race, class, power and law through both historical and contemporary works. It also explores post-feminism discrimination ignored by the modern legal system, including the glass cliff, shortlisting, emotional taxation, admin burdens, work wife syndrome, gender sidelining, imposter syndrome and other gender-based barriers. The book brings together an incredibly diverse array of scholars and experts, which we highlight with biographies and photos, because we believe who writes the content can be as important (and sometimes maybe even more important) than the content itself. If you want to learn more, this link provides a PowerPoint slide deck of all the authors featured along with thought questions from each chapter plus the Table of Contents and Introduction can be found here.
Both Shortlisted and GPLL conclude with concrete guidance for readers to apply in their educational and professional lives as they pursue leadership paths, and both books propose reforms to create a world of leaders who reflect the public they serve.
My hope is that the posts I’ve shared as a guest-blogger here at the Faculty Lounge have done the same for those of you who have taken the time to read them. Thanks for having me, and here’s to a brighter 2021!
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