Blog 37

The American Bar Association released a report regarding the difficulties women are having with becoming fully integrated within our justice system. There was documentation within this large publication that goes into great detail regarding the changes that are occurring within the profession, however, large concerns given the fact that some sort of other action needs to be taken instead of just waiting for time to try and take over this sort of thing. In 1988 the American Bar Association released its landmark report detailing the difficulties that women are having within the justice profession. They at that time were trying to determine what exactly needed to occur to have this profession become more equal in regards to the gender that was sitting in these positions. They wanted to find out mainly what the issue was. When reviewing what one of the main reasons that this sort of thing was occurring it was mainly contributed to the attitudes that were given by already practicing male attorneys. The older more tenured attorneys had this hostile attitude towards women coming into practice law. They were mixed opinions as to why, however, what it really comes down to was the fact that many male attorneys felt they were not strong enough to engage in this sort of employment position. Now given this information the report still showed in increase in women obtaining and achieving jobs in this profession. Statistical analysis shows that from 1988 to 2003 the increase in women going to law school had gone from 22% up to 47% on average. Another interesting fact were women who became general counsel for fourteen 500 companies went from 5.9 to 23.1% either way both of those facts are outstanding improvements to a getting to a more gender equal position. Holly English as well touched on many of these points. The fact that women deal with a lot of discrimination within these sorts of positions really give them a bad taste in their mouth not keeping them around very long in the private practice side of things as a lot more women tend to sit on general counsel boards for large companies.

Word count (359)