Bar Codes: Women in the Legal Profession (Law and Society) - Hardcover

Leiper, Jean McKenzie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0774813199 ISBN 13: 9780774813198

Publisher: UBC Press, 2006

Synopsis

Bar Codes documents twelve years in the lives of a group of Ontario women lawyers. Shakespeare’s Portia provides an overarching metaphor, reminding readers of women’s attempts to enter into an unfamiliar culture. Sometimes the simple act of robing can enhance a woman lawyer’s identity and grant her legitimacy. Like Portia, she is transformed from “unlessoned girl” to wise counsel. However, women also face a countervailing image, that of the powerful professional gentleman symbolizing excellence.

Women encounter the norms of the legal culture when they enter law school and repeatedly throughout their careers -- in institutions anchored in masculine customs. Because competing work and family responsibilities continue to burden professional women, time is a strong theme in this book. Temporal stress reflects concerns about family and friends, periodic sleep deprivation, and the constant pressure of overloaded schedules. Time is a form of social capital, a gendered resource that favors men in the profession.

Professional practices affect women’s career paths, and this book examines ways in which careers are sometimes broken, twisted, or attenuated, adding to mounting evidence of marked gender differences in opportunities for advancement. Bar Codes will appeal to scholars in gender, law and society, the sociology of work, not to mention women lawyers.

About this title

About the Author:

Jean McKenzie Leiper is Professor Emerita at the Department of Sociology, King’s University College, University of Western Ontario.

Review:

Bar Codes offers compelling insights into the balancing act of career and family among professionals, specifically how the careers of women lawyers are shaped, undermined, or even derailed as personal biographies confront rigid professional structures. Jean McKenzie Leiper challenges the elitist and exclusionary culture of law practice through rigorous and nuanced interpretation of in-depth interviews with over one hundred lawyers. This book will be of wide interest to scholars of the sociology of work and occupations, legal education, and feminist theory, as well as deserving of serious attention by lawyers, law professors, and law society and bar association leadership. (Fiona Kay, co-editor of Diversity, Social Capital, and the Welfare State)

About this edition

• Publisher: UBC Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0774813199
• ISBN 13: 9780774813198
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256