Religion & Law

....that was the headline on the front page of our local paper today, over a story about this report released yesterday by the White House:  "Women in America:  Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being."  The findings are old news to most of us, if we look around at our own work places.  Despite the fact that more women are increasingly more likely than men to have a bachelor's or master's degree, and that the numbers of women and men in the labor fource are almost equal, "At all levels of education, women earn about 75% of what their male counterparts earned in 2009.  In part because of these lower earnings and in part because unmarried and divorced women are the most likely to have responsibility for raising and supporting their children, women are more likely to be in poverty than men.  These economic inequities are even more acute for women of color."

What does it look like where you work?  How do the numbers of women colleagues at your level compare to the numbers of women who graduated from law school with you?  I suspect almost all of us would have to say we've lost a couple (or five or six) somewhere along the way.  The statistics in this forthcoming article substantiate that conclusion for law firms; I've documented the same on law school faculties in this article.  

Does that bother you?  Is there anything that can be done about it?  Start by taking a look at the parenting leave policies at your own workplace.  Do they make it possible for a woman who has more than one child to stay employed, let alone keep climbing up the ladder toward positions of the highest responsibility and salary?  If not, maybe that's one place to start chipping away at the persistent (and clearly complex and multi-facetted) feminization of poverty.