I know, this pic is a little old. But I still think it’s funny!
Anyway, here’s a somewhat belated Open Thread for Non-Personal Stuff. As always, Open Threads are CLOSED to MRAs/trolls, etc.
Categories
Open Thread for non-personal stuff, Sept. 2015 Amazing Cat Box Edition
@ POM
Oh perfect. Do you call people out when they go on about “politically correct” and say stuff like “Why? Did they say ‘national government’ when they meant ‘ federal government’?”
No need to get defensive and #not all lawyers. I’m not talking about individual lawyers. I’m talking about the system.
Besides, those lawyers who use their training to help the marginalized tend to have a much more frustrating and much less prosperous career than the lawyers who help the wealthy and powerful retain their wealth and power. Because the system is set up specifically to help the latter group. As brilliant as Darrow was, he frequently lost. And he had to take wealthy clients (most famously Leopold and Loeb) from time to time to make ends meet.
Let me make it more explicit then:
The research aimed to bring to life gender statistics on the profession by giving us the stories and experience of the women behind the numbers. We wanted to know about the highs and lows of being a woman in professional practice today.
Do you see it now? How “women” are not “us”? How “we” are not “women”?
No, because that’s vernacular English. The United States is not actually a nation, but everyone uses “nation” as a synonym for “country” so, whatever, I’m not here to be a prescriptivist. Good luck getting most Americans to describe to you what “federalism” is in the American context.
I pick my battles, and this is not a fight I want to have.
@POM
Actually I didn’t see that; but that’s probably an example of the sort of privilege blindness I wouldn’t have even known about before frequenting this site. [I do appreciate that I’m part of the problem]
Even knowing, intellectually, that “the Bar” includes women? Who presumably want to support other women? Note how this is not phrase that way. “The Bar” has a goal to support women, not other women, or additional women, just “women,” who are something other than the Bar.
How did this get published and nobody noticed this at all?
@Alan
Believe me, it’s something you’d notice if the entire world were talking about women and just totally excluding you as a male-identified person as being something different and other, and definitely not normal and included in the normal customary language when we talk about ourselves as a group. It sticks the hell out at you.
@ POM
Indeed, but you probably know that getting stuff like that right was the original meaning of ‘politically correct’.
Not in the US. “Politically correct” always had the meaning it has today.
This is turning into a major pet peeve for me:
Do we call the other kind “men barristers”? Say that out loud to yourself – men barristers – and tell me if it sounds ridiculous.
@ POM
I’ll be honest; I don’t pick up on that; I just read it as ‘women at the Bar’.
But as you point out, my position as a bloke makes me oblivious to stuff like that.
[Does the report actually list the authors by name? I can’t recall if it does]
I have no idea. I’m only on page 8 and my head is about to explode already, but not for the reasons you thought!
This may seem like nitpicking, but language influences thought. The way we describe things influences the way we think about them and the way we conceive of them.
“Women barristers.” For real? They couldn’t have said “barristers who are women” or “female barristers” or just “women”?
Does the construction “men barristers” parse for you at all? If not, why should “women barristers” parse????
@ POM
Indeed. I suppose in their defence [as a barrister I do that] I suppose it’s to address that in this instance they are talking specifically about one gender. To be honest, ‘female barristers’ does seem a bit ‘impersonal'(?) but ‘male barristers’ wouldn’t; and as you point out we’d never say ‘men barristers’.
So I see where you’re coming from. It does seem to be setting men as the default.
Mind you, it’s only relatively recently here that we stopped having the police as PCs and WPCs.
Hmm, thinking about all the WW2 units now. [WRENS, FANYS etc.]
PoM, I have missed the hell out of you.
Ninja’d
[I think]
Well, yes, of course. But this is not the way to do it!
I’m glad you see that!
This entire framework is The Bar (which is not really identified, but which is definitely not women) is examining women (who are definitely not The Bar) in order to investigate what their (not our) experience is. What the hell. This was published! By people who presumably had it looked over by multiple eyes first!
@POM
We could have a great discussion about feminism and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; if only I understood either of them.
The Administrative State by Woodrow Wilson has a great section in it about how what appear to be completely impartial natural sciences actually make value decisions all the time in deciding how things are classified and what should be measured. Most of the book is a great cure for insomnia, but that part has always stuck with me.
@ WWTH
Ha, wasn’t trying to get into #notalllawyers 🙂
There’s a lot of interesting stuff around this, both generally and as it ties into some of the issues of interest to this site’s viewers. The report POM is currently dissecting does look into things like why are women disproportionally involved in the areas of law more associated with social justice but worse paid.
@the other EJ
Aww, thank you! I’m much improved now.
The question this raises in my mind is not “why are women forced into those areas” but “why are those areas poorly paid?”
My kneejerk response, not having gotten to that part yet, would be “because anything associated with social justice is tainted by women, and any field tainted by women is automatically devalued.”
@ POM
Oh yeah, Wo-man, ‘one small step for a man’, distaff.
I do get that intellectually. As a straight white bloke I do understand that I am effectively the ‘type specimen’ and everyone else is identified by words that show how they differ from that ‘norm’.
I’m quite happy for that to change and I don’t think I lose anything by letting other people be individuals in their own right rather than by comparison to me.
@PoM
Dittoing what EJ said. So glad to have you back!
Okay, Alan, I have to ask you something:
This is bog-standard human research stuff and would not have been published in an American paper because it would have been handled by the researcher’s ethics board and everyone just assumes this was the case. Is it unusual in the UK to do human research this way, or is this little notice published only because it was a bunch of lawyers writing this and they have to do their lawyer thing?