“Opt Out” or Pushed Out: Are Women Choosing to Leave the Legal Profession?
“Opt Out” or Pushed Out will address the controversial phenomenon described by some as “opting out,” the supposed trend of professional women leaving the workplace to devote their energies to family care-taking, full time. This conference will focus on the dynamics of the “trend” within the legal profession, inviting legal practitioners, professional students, and scholars to critically assess the structural, institutional, and societal reasons why women lawyers may be departing from the workplace.
It will also devote significant energy to the experiences of men and how they may be similar to – or different from – those of female attorneys. Conference panels will touch on topics of parenthood, social expectations that treat men and women differently, and how the legal field can learn from other professions that have begun to accommodate the reality of male and female professionals’ multi-faceted lives.
Men and women in the legal profession — practitioners, students, and scholars — will come together to critically assess the structural, institutional and societal pressures that affect all attorneys and have made balance particularly elusive for women. The aim is to generate concrete goals and methods for improving the structure of the workplace and social perceptions of the occupational choices that attorneys make.
Speakers Include:
- E.J. Graff, Senior Researcher at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and head of the Gender and Justice Project
- Pamela Stone, Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and author of Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home
- Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much
- Pat Gillette, Founder of the Opt-In Project
- Wendy Schmidt, Principal, Deloitte and former national leader of Deloitte’s U.S. Women’s Initiative Network (WIN)
- The Honorable Nancy Gertner, Judge, U. S. District Court, District of Massachusetts and member of the Equality Commission
- Francine Deutsch, Professor of Psychology and Education, Mount Holyoke College
Registration is FREE for Yale students, faculty, and staff, only $10 for students from other schools, and $35 for the general public. Click here to register.
If women are opting out, it may be because they have priorities of what they are willing to sacrifice for money, and may find what industry demands from men – the opting out of home and family – as too high a price for success as it is currently defined.
It might also be that women, having had the privilege to experience a more full life that included home and family, wonder what is so exciting about the hours/demands that men put in to fulfill what employers identify as success.
Perhaps it is because what women know is something industry should know, but doesn’t, in its mechanical routinized objectives of using people as the cogs in its global assembly line of pawns as little more than disguised slavery dictated by unthinking, and unfeeling masters.
But then, women have never been big on slavery….