Two things which I feel the need to share.
The first, I heard from a friend. A guy
from Westlaw giving a seminar on how to use the database. Asks the class “I
need something to search. Can one of the girls in the room tell me how to spell
dishes?”
I don’t think I need to go into why this is
sexist. Fortunately, from what I heard, no-one in the class found it
particularly funny either. Which is good.
Apparently he also made comments about
women being responsible for marriage break-ups.
To make matters worse, he made exactly the
same “joke” to another seminar, on a different day. This means it was entirely
planned and pre-determined. And even despite the cold reception, he obviously
still thought it was hilarious.
My friend is going to raise it with the
lecturer – will be very interesting to see what response he gets.
Ugh.
On the bright side though, one of my (male)
lecturers apologised for the use of gendered language when reading a bit from a
case about “reasonable man”. That kinda
made my day a little bit. He also uses “she” sometimes when talking about
people in the abstract, which is pretty cool.
Conclusion? Overt sexism still exists at
law school to some extent; although it seems to be way less accepted than overt racism (see my post on the subject). More subtle sexist attitudes are much more complicated, and will
hopefully be the subject of a future blog.
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