Shop class for girls, home ec for boys!

And tiny American flags for everyone else!

Shop class for girls, home ec for boys!

I believe that is the way my kid's middle school is/was. (that is, everyone had to take both).

Mine was equitable but lame. No shop, no home ec.

No shop, no home ec.

That is why you should come over to the dark side, and join the bridge and tunnel crowd out here in Long Island.

I'm skeptical. I am awful at "hands-on fixy stuff", and it didn't pose much of an obstacle to my becoming a physicist, since I've always focused more on the theoretical end of things. I think my field is one of the worst in terms of gender ratio (though I haven't seen detailed statistical breakdowns), and I just don't see this working as an explanation. (Especially given that there are problems throughout the pipeline, even after the stage where a woman specializing in theory can pretty much avoid doing anything hands-on ever again.)

And then there are biological sciences where women are involved to a much greater extent even though they involve huge amounts of hands-on stuff. Though maybe pipetting is less gendered than the machinery of experimental physics?

The trend seems to be to move a lot of the hands-on stuff (including shop, auto repair, cosmetology, cooking/baking, etc.) to special tech-center-type high schools, aimed at non-college-bound students. I do not approve of the trend.

Err, in case it isn't clear, I'm male, so admittedly my awfulness at hands-on tasks isn't complicated by also knowing that they're viewed as gendered. I can see that that could make it more of an obstacle for women. But I still don't see how it can be a large contributor to the gender gap in my field.

6: Oh, I wouldn't begin to think that this was anything like a complete explanation for what keeps women out of technical fields; it just struck enough of a chord with me that I wondered if it might be a partial cause for some people.

On the bio end, though, I think bio is coded more feminine. Someone with my blend of neuroses on this stuff wouldn't be put off by the hands-on bio stuff in the same way at all.

I'm with essear on the gender gap in sciences issue. There are large stretches of experimental biology that have achieved gender equality. The most unequal fields are physics, computer science and math. Math and CS have no real shop-like elements, and the hands on stuff in physics can be avoided. If anything women are doing better in experimental fields.

I think the whole thing comes from the culture of the discipline. I blame places like /.

AquaMegan had a post about this-I think you even commented on it.

She has a similar pov.

As I remarked in the thread over at High Clearing, I really think a lot of this stuff comes down to role modeling, which starts at a much earlier age. LB's needing to feel "permitted" to use machinery is a perfect example. There's such a huge precedent for boys taking things apart to see how they work---even if the experiment ends with the thing broken or a mess made, there's such a tradition of it for boys that permission would always already be granted, in a way.

In my experience, most biological disciplines have at least twice as many female students as male students. The entering class in my department the year I joined was 2 male PhD students, 4 female PhD students, something like 6 female MS students, and 1 male MS student. And when you look at people who are lab techs with BS degrees, I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio was 4 to 1. There's hardly any male lab employees without post-graduate education.

However, of course, the faculty is mostly male.

Also there's a big event at the hospital complex every year in which hundreds of schoolgirls are trooped around to get them interested in science. Nope, they're already interested in biology. Troop them around a particle accelerator or a wind tunnel or something.

I always liked the more theoretical aspects of science, but I'm a real klutz, and I find visualizing gears and things hard.

I'm fascinated by neuroscience and was reading an article about nanotechnology and cell studies and wishing that I were smart enough to do that sort fo work. I have such more hand coordination that I can't do the girly bits either.

9: I guess I can see it as one more thing contributing to putting people off. I would just think it would be relatively insignificant.

I really don't have a good guess about what drives the gender gap in my field. I suspect it's largely driven by men being assholes, but despite hearing the occasional story I've never witnessed overt sexist behavior or heard overtly sexist comments from anyone in the field. There is sort of a confrontational / assholish culture of dealing with objections to people's science (I admit I'm sometimes far too rude when I think a seminar speaker is being an idiot), which isn't sexist per se but that I could definitely imagine making some people uncomfortable in a way that tends to divide on gendered lines.

I think the whole thing comes from the culture of the discipline. I blame places like /.

If I were going to invoke gender differences, I would invoke them here to say that it seems like more women would have enough sense not to want to spend 18 hours a day talking to a computer and roughly zero hours talking to people.

As soon as I fuck anything up at all, or even before I've fucked anything up, I'm convinced that I'm doing whatever it is slower and worse than someone competent would, and if there's anyone I think is more skilled around to defer to, I'll fade into the background at the smallest excuse.

Whereas if you were convinced that you could do it and had something to prove you would keep plugging until you got it done. So, nothing to prove?

That's all separate from the other cultural thread of not touching anything with your hands to declare your membership of the delicate-handed giant-headed ruling overclass.

max
['Oh, Prince Hal, where have you gone?']

hand coordination that I can't do the girly bits either

You must be *very* happy to have a boyfriend now.

What Stanley said in 7. We had good science labs as well as shop courses where I went to HS, but enrollment in the latter was typically a marker of economic class. I regret not being more aware of that at the time.

In the thread to the linked post, Thoreau and another commenter point out that the gender disparities don't hold in medicine.

15: I don't have a gender related explanation (or really, much of an explanation at all) for why I left physics. But some of this kind of stuff did, I think, play into it to an extent -- even in classes I was doing fine in, I did kind of feel like not a real nerd. Despite the fact that it had nothing to do with the classes I was taking, I had the picture of a real physics student as someone who, e.g., felt comfortable with a soldering iron. This is all inchoate stuff, obviously, and it's probably a better partial explanation for underrepresentation in non-bio sciences generally than for differences between physics and other technical fields.

Whereas if you were convinced that you could do it and had something to prove you would keep plugging until you got it done. So, nothing to prove?

Wouldn't a lot of this depend on how encouraging your mentors/peers/parents were about this sort of stuff? When I was a kid, my mom talked to me about cooking, had me around when she was cooking, involved me in the process of cooking with its successes and failures, and helped me figure out recipes on my own when I wanted to experiment. Despite all that, I wouldn't say that my mom actually taught me how to cook: I got to college barely knowing how to feed myself, somehow, but when I started to get interested in cooking, I was well equipped, mentally, to learn and try things out.

On the other hand, if I had ever tried to take the clock or computer apart, I swear my parents would have stopped me right quick. That kind of experimental tinkering wasn't modeled and wasn't encouraged. For whatever reason, my dad didn't do that stuff in front of us (he wasn't particularly patient or comfortable as a teacher), and it was coded as "making a mess" rather than "building useful technical skills."

That there is how gender roles get imprinted. I dunno, calling it "something to prove" seems too self-directed. Certain behaviors get encouraged, and others get discouraged. Maybe some children have really strong, atypical desires and drives, which cause them to overturn expectations, but culture is a huge factor.

19

I don't have a gender related explanation (or really, much of an explanation at all) for why I left physics. ...

One suspects that maybe you just didn't enjoy it. Speaking of which a young lady I know has just been accepted to a top three law school. Any advice before she goes deeply in debt to pay for it?

Hm. I dropped out of the sciences (biological) in part because I realized that I'd never make a good bench scientist - not because I was afraid of the hands on stuff (though my extreme clumsiness did ruin a number of experiments) but because I realized I wouldn't have the patience to do good science. And, because I am atrociously bad at visualizing things in my head, and thus o. chem was extraordinarily painful.

As for hands on projects not involving science, I'm not particularly good at any of them, but I forge ahead anyway. My step-father, son of a shop teacher, made sure I got a shop education at home, in the form of wood-working, car repair, and other basic skills. Again, due to lack of patience to do things right and an inability to visualize in my head, I find a lot of such things not to my liking but will happily help other people. Also, beyond cooking, I'm terrible at the "girly" activities like knitting, though I've tried.

21: It's too late to say "Get a job as a paralegal for a year so you have a realistic sense of the life", but if it weren't too late I'd say that. If she's going in with an idealistic desire to do public interest work, tell her she needs to have a clear, realistic, definite plan that she's moving toward from the first day of school -- if she drifts along, she'll end up in private practice. She should be on a journal, even if she doesn't make law review.

Which are the top three? I could list a top ten pretty confidently, but not order them.

What kind of history do you do )thetical? Did you wind up doing any history of science?

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Any chance we can get a Chicago Memorial Day weekend planning post? Di and Po-Mo Polymath are already in, but I don't know if anyone else knows about it (and I'm not sure who else is in Chicago).
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Further to 23: The debt is crazy, of course, and crazier than it was even when I graduated. From a really top-end school, she shouldn't have any trouble getting a high paying job, and I think that most of the top schools have loan forgiveness programs for public interest jobs these days -- NYU did. But she should check that out if it's an issue for her.

25: Oy, I'm sorry -- I did see your email, and then got busy and dropped it. I'll do it now.

W00t! Thanks, LB.

Out of here to enjoy the beautiful weather.

I had a very brief woodshop class in high school, and it sucked. It was pitched too easy for people who already knew some basics (many of the boys) and there wasn't enough time for those who didn't to gain any actual skills. Plus the power saws were scary, and there was really not even enough time to get over that. I was certainly VERY inhibited about doing stuff in there, in front of others, and felt uncoordinated, awkward, and worried about cutting my hand off.

Actually, I suppose that was in middle school, not high school. Further to 30: I draw and cook and knit and do delicate paper crafts well; I sew very impatiently and badly. If woodshop had been presented as a semester-long art elective, instead of a three-week segment of a vo-tech sampler, I bet I would have excelled.

24: I did history of science and medicine (more partial to the medicine) as an extra field and I would like it to be central to some project I do in the future (presuming I get that far in the field), but it didn't make it into my dissertation, unfortunately. I had a very hard time trying to decide between applying for history of medicine/science programs and more general American history. I still second guess myself on that choice all the time.

(After rereading my comment, I'm trying to figure out why I have the patience to cook correctly but not to build a bookcase. I'm guessing that enjoyment of the end product probably plays a role in this).

I similarly have no idea why I have the patience to cook elaborate things and to spend several hours on a complex illustration, but not to sew a garment. I even like clothes!

Oh god, I love the hands-on fixy stuff. Even simple things like hanging up pictures in my house, I love (you get to bang on things with a hammer!). I love putting together Ikea furniture. One of the funnest things I did in this vein was taking apart my laptop to replace the hard drive. So many screws! So delicate!

This is one of the few things I absolutely, positively hate about dating. Dudes always want to get in on the fixy. And you can never, ever ask for "help" without them taking over the whole goddamn operation. The idea of doing something "together" often just doesn't seem to compute. But guys are weird. I have known many who don't seem to particularly enjoy the kind of stuff I'm talking about, but take over in doing it out of some kind of sense of manly duty. And they'd rather bear their manly-sweaty frustration alone.

23

It's too late to say "Get a job as a paralegal for a year so you have a realistic sense of the life", but if it weren't too late I'd say that ...

She did have some sort of summer job or something working in an US Attorney's office. Don't know how good a picture of legal life that gives.

If you had it all to do over again would you become a lawyer?

Which are the top three? I could list a top ten pretty confidently, but not order them.

The school was number 3 on a list I saw. So perhaps top 5 would have been more accurate but top 3 sounds more impressive.

Thinking about this more, I am really bitter about this! Like, say, for example, getting loose a particularly tight screw. And I'm having trouble applying enough force. It would be easiest for me to find the nearest dude, who is stronger than me, and have him do something for 3 seconds, get it loose, then let me take back over.

But noooooo. It's like once you have one stumbling block, you've admit defeat and you should just let the big man do it.

I'd let you do it, leblanc. I'd even let you use my recip saw. I tend to get impatient with people who can't handle basic fixy stuff.

You need a better selection of male friends, monsieur leblanc.

And a better selection of tools. Get a quarter inch drive ratchet with an adapter for the little screwdriver bits that have the quarter inch hex shanks. Also a brace, such as used to be used with auger bits, and you can chuck a hex shaft screwdriver bit in that. Gives you a foot or so of angular leverage, and you can lean your weight on it so the bit doesn't slip. The older I get the more important I find it to figure out ways to substitute intelligence or tools for strength.

JBS, did you friend apply to any other schools? Any schools that might give her a decent scholarship and/or not cost that much? If so, she should go there.

Going to a top law school just is NOT worth it, given the uncertainty of finding a job. My law school was top ten and I have unemployed friends. Moreover, I think after this recession the legal market and the willingness of law firms to hire scads of associates and pay them a shitload is going to change dramatically.

The debt just is. not. worth it. I wouldn't change my decision to go to law school, but I would have applied to some less "prestigious" schools, found a place where I could go for cheap. You can distinguish yourself anywhere, and I could be doing what I'm doing now.

Let me tell you about my life now. I went to the most expensive law school in the county. My debt service comes out to about 2000/month. I feel incredibly constrained. I can't take a break. I can't save up money and take a month off between jobs. There are bunches of jobs I've seen that I can't take because they pay too little, but they don't qualify me for loan assistance.

I don't want to do "woe is me", but it really does kind of suck not feeling like you have options.

39.2 is actually the internet substitute for taking over a project yourself.

tend to get impatient with people who can't handle basic fixy stuff.

See, so do a lot of people. The problem is, the vast majority of people think that this category includes "women." Unless you are a super-masculine-presenting woman, people are going to assume that you don't know what the fuck you're doing.

I love mechanical projects and sewing projects, but I can't get into cooking. Cooking always seems like ice sculpture to me - an hour after I eat, will I care whether I had the lamb souffle or the bowl of cereal?

I had an uncle who would always do woodshop projects with me when I was growing up, and I was the only one out of the seven cousins who really expressed an interest, and he ran with it.

Also I took a year of shop in high school, but it was kind of a battle to get into that class. But because it crossed de facto SES lines, not gender lines. I was in an IB program nested in a bigger school, and our classes were set up so that all the IB kids were pooled together in their electives, in order to promote elitism and help keep class and racial tensions at a near-boil, as best I can tell.

Anyway, there was no shop section that worked with the generic IB slotted schedule and I was outright told I couldn't take it. (I always suspected someone behind the scenes went to bat for me, because I was really surprised to be put in it.)

I was the only girl in the class, and one of four white kids, (the other three were extremely, um, rural, and I did not gravitate towards them), and everyone else besides the teacher was black. That was the only time I've been a racial minority for an extended situation.

I became friends with some of the kids in the class, but I couldn't ever shake the feeling that others of them were laughing at me behind my back. A classmate named Al was particularly nice to me in an avuncular way, which helped a ton, but then he dropped out of school about halfway through the year and I was more isolated after that.

Look at me, practically writing a blog entry. This is my second time home alone with Hawaiian Punch. Maybe I'm getting Hawaiian Punchy.

Unless you are a super-masculine-presenting woman, people are going to assume that you don't know what the fuck you're doing

See, that's when you need the recip saw, to wave in their faces/threaten to cut off their penises.

lamb souffle

Ew.

Well, I'd say that all men except me act weird because all women except you expect us to, but that usually doesn't work.

If you had it all to do over again would you become a lawyer?

Honestly, I dunno. I'm not so much with the work-ethic -- while I gripe about lawyering, I don't have a clear idea of what I'd like better. While I daydream about other professions, they've all got their drawbacks as well. If I were just back from the Peace Corps with my Medieval Studies degree and no particular ideas again, I easily might end up in law school for lack of a different direction.

But you should listen to leblanc about the money (or at least pass on what she says to your friend.) I did nine years at top paying firms (well, three of those were at not-quite top, but pretty close) making truly obscene money, lived comfortably but not extravagantly (that is, bought books and groceries without even thinking about the cost, and spent like crazy on child care, but not much in the way of luxury purchases), and hardly saved anything beyond 401K contributions. It all went to debt, And prices have gone way up since I did it, and the job market is less secure.

I also hate it when men use the fact that they're stronger to condescend to you in a "let me do it" kind of way. I get in this fight with my (otherwise wonderful) boyfriend at least once a month. He's not a particularly macho guy, but he seems invested in the fact that he's stronger than me. And he is, not just in normal average-dude-stronger-than-average-woman way, but he's significantly bigger, taller, stronger etc.

So, according to him, this means that he should always do the "harder" task. Because he is stronger. It drives me batty. Let's say we have two boxes that have to go from point A to point B. One box is 20 lbs, one box is 10. Now, I have no problem carrying either of those boxes. Neither does he. So why should it matter who carries which? Now, if one is a 50 lb box and one is 20, sure, take the heavier one. Or if it's a TV versus a chair, sure. But if there's one 20 lb box and one bag of doritos? You can guess who's on dorito duty.

Of course, he thinks I'm the macho one, and claims that I'm trying to "prove" that I can lift heavy stuff. Which, I can. I'm pretty strong for a woman. So I don't see why I need to get the vapors just because someone significantly stronger happens to be nearby.

[/rant]

The only time I get treated in a particularly gendered way around mechanical stuff is at Home Depot or Lowe's or something. And I instinctively put it out there, asking advice in a big-eyed idiotic voice, out of fear of seeming ignorant or something.

The other area where I become pretty helpless is anything electrical. And I will not go near anything plumbing related, because my one foray under the sink stunk so bad that I decided plumbers are a bargain.

out of fear of seeming ignorant or something.

s/b out of fear of seeming arrogant. I play up the ignorance, but seeming arrogant in that setting...somehow seems embarrassing. Like, I will know exactly how I want to put something together but will have zero vocabulary to describe tools or whatever, and it's easier to go with the ignorance-vibes.

I really am a clutz with my hands: or rather, I have poor spatio-muscular coordination, related to my lack of depth perception, which means that if a task requires depth perception (and most fixy stuff does, dammit) I'm really going to be crap at it. Not in a gendered way, either.

I have never been sure whether to add brightly "But fortunately, I'm female, so I don't have to be good at that!" or "Unfortunately, I'm female, so people just assume of course I'm going to be bad at it because I'm a girl."

On the other hand, the greatest thing I ever bought for myself was a spirit level. Suddenly, it didn't matter that I couldn't tell by sight if two points on the wall were at the same level: the spirit level can tell! And so, I can drill holes into the wall with my super 16-bit power drill nicknamed Polly just like any other butch dyke would.

Suddenly, it didn't matter that I couldn't tell by sight if two points on the wall were at the same level: the spirit level can tell!

But no one can tell visually. At least, being able to tell isn't synonymous with having mechanical sense. I think this is some sort of attribution error, where you're taking a common experience and chalking it up to a personal short-coming, and thus reinforcing a possibly bogus premise.

Yeah, who are the people who don't need levels in order to make things level?

I was embarrassed because I couldn't pound nails into the wall with my fists, but now that I have a hammer nobody can tell how unmanly I am.

Out of sympathy to womankind I have failed to learn any of the basic manly skills except for the most rudimentary rough carpentry.

53: I was wondering whether I could get away with claiming that my utter ineptitude at household fix-it tasks was a stand for feminism.

I do have one rare skill: I can drive a nail with two strokes of a hammer, and within 1/4" of driving a nail with one stroke. The only carpentry job I ever had consisted of driving nails over and over again for three days.

On the role model front: there is a rather unusual job available at the moment, which carries a lot of prestige and public recognition. I wonder if a woman in that sort of position would make any substantial difference in public perception of the field. (There is at least one woman well-suited to that job who might plausibly take it if offered. People who know the people involved better than I do tell me it's unlikely to happen, though.)

The modern spirit level, where you just have one vial with a bubble in it, wasn't invented until the 1920s! I find that amazing.

Like M., I had a wonderful time taking apart my laptop to replace the hard drive. Snark and I are about equivalently fix-it deficient, which makes it into more of an urban aesthete failing than a gendered issue, which is nice.

56: I don't know if Heebie wants to move to the UK right after having a baby, but if it were up to me, I'd offer her the job.

Oh look, some random person on the internet has suggested the same possibility I was discussing with people the other day. But Heebie would work too.

40

JBS, did you friend apply to any other schools? ...

No, inspiring some doubt as to her commitment to a legal career.

Going to a top law school just is NOT worth it, given the uncertainty of finding a job. ...

Any comments on this post which basically asserts the opposite (although it implicitly assumes you will go to the best school you can get into).

re: 61

I think the post you linked is more than a bit overwrought. On the other hand, it is no secret (to lawyers, anyway) that the job market can be tough for people that are not top graduates of good law schools.

The fact is, though, lots of people find jobs as lawyers even if they are not top graduates of top schools. What they probably will not find is a job as an associate at a prestigious law firm, which is the best route to being a wealthy partner at a big law firm. But I have heard tell that people survive on only $100,000 a year, so it it is possible to have a good career without being a big firm partner.

Even more, the fact is that it defies common sense to feel aggreived, as the writer of the linked post seems to, that not everyone makes $3 million a year (I think this is the average for that partners at the firm I started at as an associate). That is just not what most lawyers make. You can work very hard and if you are good you can make a good living--better than the vast majority of Americans. This does not seem like a bad deal to me. But it is a tough business, and people who think otherwise are, I think, just fooling themselves.

JBS, if your friend wants to talk to a former NYC big firm litigation associate that now is a NYC small firm litigation partner, you can get my e-mail address from LizardBreath. Fair warning--I like being a lawyer notwithstanding how hard the work can be.

20:Wouldn't a lot of this depend on how encouraging your mentors/peers/parents were about this sort of stuff? When I was a kid, my mom talked to me about cooking, had me around when she was cooking, involved me in the process of cooking with its successes and failures, and helped me figure out recipes on my own when I wanted to experiment.

I think this would depend on how easily molded or discouraged you are.

Despite all that, I wouldn't say that my mom actually taught me how to cook: I got to college barely knowing how to feed myself, somehow, but when I started to get interested in cooking, I was well equipped, mentally, to learn and try things out.

Ah, see, my mother didn't cook worth a damn, mostly out of sheer laziness/short attention span, in spite of the fact that she insisted she do do. So when I was teen, I figured it was learn to cook or starve, and I figured I needed to learn it correctly... because I'm like that. Chemistry! My mother then encouraged me in the sense that she was happy to have someone else do it, but not happy for me to request things to buy. Apparently I eventually embarrassed her into learning to cook properly.

On the other hand, if I had ever tried to take the clock or computer apart, I swear my parents would have stopped me right quick. That kind of experimental tinkering wasn't modeled and wasn't encouraged.

Oh, my mother was much the same way, as in 'don't go crazy', 'can you put it back together again' and 'don't make a mess/kill yourself/etc'. I taught myself (again), plus shop class. Nonetheless she remains opposed to that sort of thing, since she apparently has this notion that she could do it herself, she just wouldn't waste time on stuff like that. Of course, when she tries to do it herself, she does a totally quarter-assed job.

That there is how gender roles get imprinted. I dunno, calling it "something to prove" seems too self-directed. Certain behaviors get encouraged, and others get discouraged.

Oh, sure.

Maybe some children have really strong, atypical desires and drives, which cause them to overturn expectations, but culture is a huge factor.

See above. My mother is intensely competitive with men (which is really pretty shitty when you're eight) and very jealous, but has no sense of craftsmanship and no staying power. So, when she decided (out of the blue, probably for reasons of wanting to be competitive with me) she wanted to go back to CC some 20 years ago and get some AA degree as a computer tech, I was all like, 'Sure, go for it.' Mor emoney, etc. But she was the only woman there, and she didn't have much of knack for it. But worse, she didn't really try very hard. She got decent grades as long as she had me to tutor her, but she got hammered in some idiot intro CS class by a Hindu dude, and she just folded. Really didn't get a damn thing out of the degree, because she wasn't doing it because she liked it and was willing to practice, she just wanted to show she was good enough or better than me or something like that.

max
['I did not, mind, understand at the time that she was competing with me.']

Yeah, who are the people who don't need levels in order to make things level?

I'm actually pretty darn good at that.

As for what I said above about modeling behavior, there were a couple of experiences I had working with my dad on home fix-it stuff that was somewhat empowering, and they all had to do with moments when it became clear that my dad was completely making shit up as he went along. There was the time he had me crawl through the insulation in the attic, trailing a wire, which I then wrapped around a pipe to ground it. There was the time I called him in to help set up a mounted bookshelf, and after the stud-finder gave a bunch of false positives, he got mad and drilled holes in the wall all over the place, saying "It's my wall, I can drill holes in it all over the place if I want." And of course there were all fifty-seven-thousand times he tried to plug leaks in the hot tub because he was too cheap to call in a professional; I didn't pay much attention to what he was doing in those cases, however, since I thought he was crazy.

That sort of devil-may-care spirit has indeed led me not to fear home repair, even home repair that I should fear, like the time I hooked up an old stove to the gas line in my apartment in France. ("Okay, I don't smell any gas, I'll try lighting a match on the other side of the room.") But scientific apparatus has always bored the shit out of me. My dad bought a microscope and a telescope for us kids to tinker around with at the house, and I was never, ever interested. "Oh. Bacteria. Um, yeah, I can see them."

I think the article in 61 is correct. A lot of law schools don't have good job placements. People can end up heavily in debt to make a not huge amount of money.

The starting salary for lawyers is bimodal:
http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2007/09/distribution-of.html
You pretty much need to be from a top 14 law school to have a better than 50/50 shot at the well paying jobs.

That graph also ignores the law school graduates that don't get law jobs at all.

The top 3 law school is a good bet assuming the economy turns around.

One of the things that fascinates me about this topic is the social consequences for being wrong. There are some areas that we all have to deal with all the time (laundry, automobiles) where the social consequences of being wrong are very different for men and women. There are others that we have to deal with less often, but still have very gendered expectations.

I don't know how that translates to science-y or math-y professional careers, but I'm completely willing to believe that societal perceptions of who is "supposed" to be good at certain kinds of tasks greatly influence children's and teens' ability to experiment with something that they're not yet perfect at. There really are a lot of pipeline problems.

On the topic of law schools, I admit to not knowing why more people don't go to school at night and work during the day. Is it that the most prestigious schools don't have night programs? It's certainly a heck of a lot easier to pay for that way.

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No more masturbating to Bea Arthur.

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51:I prefer my pictures crooked. I mean really, why does everything have to be parallel? My bookcases, desk, cabinets, doors, all these straight parallel lines are oppressing and enraging me.

This comment box!!! Going postal now.

The comment box is subtly crooked.

The comment box seems to be empty of kittens, these days.

The histogram in 65 is kind of shocking.

Stupid question: what does a job of "law clerk" mean? A couple of acquaintances (really, former friends I lost touch with) who went to top law schools and then got jobs at big, famous law firms apparently have the title of "law clerk", when I had assumed they would start out as some sort of associate. But I know nothing about law jobs.

Oh, maybe they deferred their big firm job temporarily to clerk at a court?

51:I prefer my pictures crooked. I mean really, why does everything have to be parallel? My bookcases, desk, cabinets, doors, all these straight parallel lines are oppressing and enraging me.

bob wants to live in the Cabinet of Dr. Kaligari.

re: 65

I draw a slightly different conclusion than the author of the post to the graph in the linked post at 65.

First, if I understand the data, this is salaries for new graduates. That is skewed by the fact that many (I do not know the percentage, but I would guess maybe 10 - 15 percent at prestigious law schools) new graduates take low paying but highly competitive and career enhancing clerkships for a year or two after law school, but then make lots of money at big firms later. So starting salaries are not quite as bad as the graph may indicate.

Second, and more to the point, the graph does not say much about where people end up 15 years down the line. Some people can't get a job and drop out of the profession. Many who were on the left side of the graph move to the center as they establish themselves and many on the right side of the graph move to the center as they leave big fims (the vast majority of big firm associates do not become big firm partners) and go to smaller firms, go in-house etc.

None of this is to say that the law is easy money or that some people don't overestimate what kind of living they will make, but I think there is a tendancy to make it seem harder or worse than it is.

NOTE: I am talking in the long run, as one must. No doubt about it, things are tough right now, particularly for big firm lawyers whose firms have imploded and new graduates who find offers revoked or deferred and the people pushed out of (or lower in) the market while people look for work.

67: Fuck, my fantasy life hasn't been so disturbed since Bettie Page died!

re: 71

A law clerk is a lawyer who assists a judge with research and, usually, writing opinions. Federal court clerkships and clerkships at the top state appellate courts are very competitive. Indeed, at a top school, it is not unusual to see the very top graduates in a class making only $60,000 or so three years after graduation because they are clerking at the US Supreme Court. They can pertty much write their own ticket as far as jobs are concerned after that and I believe big firms pay former Supreme clerks huge ($100,000, maybe more) bonuses when they start.

I generally find levels to be useless, because a picture that is perpendicular to gravity will be 10 to 15 degrees off of parallel with the ceiling and floor.

In my current house there is often a real dilemma over which surface to align another surface with. Walls, ceiling and floor are all likely to give different guides.

71, 76: If the "law clerks" are working at firms, rather than for judges, I think it's a signal that they haven't been admitted to the bar yet -- you start working before you know if you've passed yet, and even once you've passed, there are bureaucratic hurdles before you can actually practice law. So first year associates generally aren't actually allowed to practice law independently. Most firms just call everyone an associate, admitted or not, but I think some firms still call them clerks.

60: The last blog conversation I read about Lisa Randal was an argument over whether it was appropriate to mention repeatedly and in public that she is a stone fox. That might be a fun argument to have here.

74: The problem with all that is the debt. While a better than average living is no more than anyone should expect out of law school, it would have been really hard to pay the amount of debt I had on less than a Biglaw salary, and graduates now are mostly going to have more debt than I did.

I honestly don't know what the best choice is between a huge debt load from a great school, or a much cheaper pretty good school -- I think it'd have to come down to having a very realistic idea of what job you expected to get out of school. If you were sure that the job you wanted hired people from the cheap school, that'd probably be the better option. Otherwise, I don't know.

79: No, we should try to ignore that.

76, 78: Thanks, I guess I'll just have to ask next time I run into one of them. I know they're somehow already attached to a firm, so maybe 78 is the right explanation. (I'm sort of amused by the idea of $100k bonuses to people who clerked. "Oh, you poor benighted soul, slaving away for only $60k a year! Let us make it up to you." But I suppose the debt makes it somewhat less amusing.)

79: Oh, ick, I think I read the same discussion (or a similar one). I fall squarely on the "inappropriate" side, especially given certain aspects of her career trajectory.

I fall squarely on the "inappropriate" side, especially given certain aspects of her career trajectory.

? I can't figure out what aspects of a woman's career as a physicist would make it even less appropriate to opine on her appearance. I mean, it starts out inappropriate, but what were the special circumstances?

Ogged never would have allowed such squeamishness.

83: Err, right, sorry, that was completely unclear. I shouldn't mention any details, but one of her moves from one university to another was strongly correlated with problematic behavior from a male colleague. Which I guess doesn't directly have any impact on how appropriate it is to publicly comment on her appearance, just somehow seems to make it more distasteful to me.

Ah, that makes sense.

I am sceptical also. It might account for the male-skewed gender ratio in experimental physics and engineering, and probably in computing, but the one in maths itself? I know the linked post addresses this a little.

I don't have brothers, so I have to take anecdata from other families, but among generation Y I have seen the kind of upbringing where the son's chores are chopping wood and fixing gutters with his father, and the daughter's are making cakes and scrubbing the floor with her mother, alive and well. And I don't know anything about LB's family, but the result is often adults who regard opposite-gender-identified skills as something very difficult and easy to mess up, even if genuinely interested and motivated in learning them.

Isn't it weird realizing that things that you think of as relics of the past are still alive and well? I've had two cases against a lawyer who's on kind of a nutty crusade, and have spent a fair amount of time talking to him on the phone, arranging this and that. And the guy has a heavy Queens accent, and is,eh, it's hard to describe: way, way, overpolite in a "this is how well-brought up men talk to women" kind of way from the 1950's. Not obnoxious or hard to deal with, but weirdly out of date. I didn't think much of it -- I figured he was nearing retirement, and the goofily chivalrous manner was a relic of having grown up a long time ago.

I met the guy face to face on Friday, at oral argument on a motion I was making, and he's in his forties -- not much older than me. I'd been expecting him to be seventy or so.

77:Ain't no dilemma, although anything less than a 20 degree skew can create a visual tension. 30-45 degrees off perpendicular is best.

And you can just guesstimate! You don't want all your pictures and wall attachments crooked in any kind of synchronized way.

C'mon folks, don't tell you haven't gone crazy with "grandpa's picture on the left side of the bookcase is 1/2 inch lower than the beach scene on the right side of the bookcase" afternoons.

And yet that 1/2 inch will always look like a mistake, whereas two inches and a different slant will look like a choice.

And if there's some dirt on the carpet, just put big globs of mud all over the place. No one will doubt that that was intentional, unless you're obviously insane.

I have been complimented on my ability to look beyond a woman's appearance and, in effect, compliment her on things other than her appearance. Basically this comes from my resentment of how some people are more attractive than others, which leads to hopeless but valiant attempts to ignore appearance entirely. Which is possible with people who are not scantily clad.

I met the guy face to face on Friday, at oral argument on a motion I was making, and he's in his forties -- not much older than me. I'd been expecting him to be seventy or so.

This is particularly funny because I just met the guy who's been doing my yardwork for six months. All our previous contact has been by phone, and due in large measure to his heavy regional accent and manner of speaking, I had him pegged for 55-60.

Yeah, turns out he's mid-twenties. Ulp.

84: Srsly. I was just remembering the great Ogged post Don't bomb my country: its full of hotties. I am sad to see now that the picture of hotties he linked to is no longer online.

Also, not to be obnoxious, but I am honestly curious about the night-law-school option. Is it there a stigma to it? Is it that there are few programs available? Is it that you wind up with exactly the same amount of debt (which I find hard to believe, just on the basis of so many white-collar jobs being willing to give you tuition reimbursement)?

Because if I really wanted to pursue a career, and there was a way to study for it part-time at way less cost, I would think it would be a no-brainer. So obviously there is something about that law that I am ignorant of.

Fortunately this one he saved for posterity.

94: I don't think any of the very best schools have night schools, and there's a pretty hard line between the top fifteen or so schools and everyplace else -- Biglaw, and federal clerkships, and academia all draw very heavily from those top schools. Once you're in the next tier down, I don't think there's a stigma to night school, but I'm not sure.

I think there's always a stigma.

94: I think the idea of night school just never caught on in the legal profession at the higher levels. Prestigious business schools tend to have evening programs, but I guess that's because the MBA was frequently assumed to be a later-in-life degree taken by people who already have some established career and prospects.

Other professional graduate schools, like medicine and law, are pretty much the required degree to even start in the fields (I think partially because there's not yet an established system for pulling in undergrads to do clerk, paralegal, nurse, etc. positions on the way to a career in the upper echelons of the field), so they assume someone should just do them straight out of undergrad, and blast through them fulltime to get into their career as soon as possible.

The question is whether the stigma is material. It can be overcome with grade, I suppose, although class rank from the night division isn't going to impress people as much. At the other side of the materility scale, a firm that isn't going to hire someone from the CUA or Temple (to pick two) day division, isn't going to hire from the night division either. A non-profit isn't likely to care at all, and might be more interested in independent projects, special courses, or internships anyway.

||
Charley, are you watching this game? If not, you should be.
|>

All our previous contact has been by phone, and due in large measure to his heavy regional accent and manner of speaking, I had him pegged for 55-60. Yeah, turns out he's mid-twenties.

Well screw him then.

If you're a cop though, and you go to law school at night, you are a)much more likely to be a good guy, and b)much more likely to be tragically shot.

96-99: Ah, thanks. That makes sense.

(I wonder, though -- if it matter that much to corporate law firms and to the government, then I suspect some nonprofits would care very much indeed about where you want to school. Others, of course, would have the luxury of not caring.)

What's CUA?

||
What was the name of that guy that the Marlins forced us to take in that Beckett-Ramirez deal?
|>

101: Thank you, John, for providing the perfect example of the abiding value of Wolfsonian-M/llsian punctuation pickiness.

What was the name of that guy the Red Sox were so desperate to get that they agreed to take Lowell as well? The guy who gave up 8 runs today?

Wrong thread, Jesus.

My brother goes to night school out of sheer financial necessity. If your friend can wait five years, I'll let you know how it turns out.
If I were a big machine law firm, I'd prize associates who are accustomed to working 7am-9pm plus study time, but that's just me. The day school people my brother knows seem like undergrads to me, i.e. they're in for a big shock when they hit the job market.

Also on the lawyer tack, for JBS's friend: I've got two unemployed lawyers (or, not-yet-employed lawyers-to-be would be more accurate) living with me this summer and somewhat indefinitely into the fall as they take the bar and start the job hunt. It's pretty rough when they're having trouble, as both are graduating from quite good schools (though neither went to a "top fourteen" school) and have quite excellent job histories where they've done considerable work (i.e. one worked for government agencies, the other has worked for a small local firm, so they've both been doing a fair amount of actual lawyering in the past few years unlike what I've heard from my friends who did BigLaw summers).

My other friend who did the best was actually the one who avoided all debt by taking scholarships straight through. Since she was a kick-ass engineer in undergrad, University of Iowa gave her a full ride to specialize in IP law. Turns out their program in that field is pretty excellent despite the school being not-so-well-reputed. All dozenish students in her year who were on the same scholarship got placements at top IP law firms (she's at Kirkland). That may be sort of like LB and m. leblanc's "lower prestige, but no debt" option, only with a side of finding out who among lower tier schools has a specialty that they're pouring money into with some success.

But if your lady friend has good manual dexterity and doesn't much care about her profession, may I suggest dentistry? If she can get top honors at a dental school, orthodontics and endodontics are extremely lucrative specialties with much less infuriating hours than corporate law. Also, orthodontists get to mildly torment teenagers and make them cry each day, at a hundred dollars a visit! Talk about job satisfaction.

I am watching, Jesus.

Catholic University of America. The Pope's own law school.

106: Neighbor, please. Thanks again for Jason Bay, though.

107: Ah, I see.

I'm tempted to join this discussion about night school, because I've been spinning my wheels for a while and thinking about going back to school. But I guess I'd rather just watch baseball.

91.2: I have been complimented on my ability to look beyond a woman's appearance and, in effect, compliment her on things other than her appearance. Basically this comes from my resentment of how some people are more attractive than others, which leads to hopeless but valiant attempts to ignore appearance entirely.

Yay! Truly, commenting on a woman's appearance in a context in which she clearly isn't courting comments is in poor taste. Pace Ogged.

OT: I smell a business opportunity.

How long before someone markets dust jackets for the Kindle, so you can once again show the world what you're reading?

Since she was a kick-ass engineer in undergrad, University of Iowa gave her a full ride to specialize in IP law.

She's presumably a member of the patent bar then, and it's my understanding that patent attorneys can mostly write their own ticket.

I want to be a patent attorney. Will having a PhD help me in any way? Is it insanely boring? Are you forced to do things that make no sense at all because of our nonsensical patent system, or is the system only nonsensical at the margins (e.g. software)?

115: My friend the patent attorney mostly loves his job. As he sees it, he gets to learn nifty new things all time and he gets to write a lot. Also, he makes an un-fucking-holy amount of money and hasn't even been at it all that long.

115: I think industry experience in whatever your field is might help more, but that's not based on anything concrete. Another friend of mine has just started law school after three years designing chips for Intel (can you tell I went to a nerd high school?), and she'll do just fine. I'm not so sure about most of my other friends currently in the law school system though.

113: I read a lot in public places, and have ever only had one short friendship come of it. Lending books though, is a different story. I once got laid off of Cyteen, of all things.

I can imagine a PhD being a good selling point for a patent lawyer. Some of ours have them, I think.

113: Silliness!

There was an NPR story recently about a woman who creates purses and wallets (?) from books, and she carried on about the fact that books have always been a fashion accessory, observing that people have books shelved in their homes in order to say something about themselves. Oh.

We had patent lawyers in our DC office, but they all went to other firms some years ago. Nobody missed them. In the least.

I think male activities are those that lead to injury and wear and tear to limbs and beyond.

Mechanics, woodworkers, metalworkers, landscapers, wearing steel toed boots, with nicked and stained fingers: men.

Pastrymakers, sous chefs, beauticians, crocheters: ladies.

Is chopping wood too abstract for women who knit fancy sweaters ? Prob. not. But the splinters !

I myself have been papercut before the iPhone/Twitter era. Maybe I should invent pink Lego for girls.

Always liked that Lowell fellow.

94

Also, not to be obnoxious, but I am honestly curious about the night-law-school option. Is it there a stigma to it? ...

Seems like it would take a while and probably has little chance to lead to a biglaw job. Might make sense if you are say a cop who can retire after 20 years and is looking for a second career.

Because if I really wanted to pursue a career, and there was a way to study for it part-time at way less cost, I would think it would be a no-brainer. So obviously there is something about that law that I am ignorant of.

Once upon a time you could work for a lawyer for a few years and then take the bar without going to law school at all which seems like a efficient way of learning the profession but I think it is hard or impossible to do that today.

Might make sense if you are say a cop who can retire after 20 years and is looking for a second career.

Mendoza!

Mendoza!

Located via celestial navigation!

A century ago legal education was haphazard and a lot of lawyers were virtually self-taught. I actually don't see that there's been any improvement -- for every lawyer there's an anti-lawyer, and when both of them keep on getting get smarter and smarter, you just end up breaking even anyway.

ESPN is claiming simultaneously that AJ Burnett gave up 16 hits and 8 runs in five innings, and that the final score was 5-3. Sounds like some game.

A century ago legal education was haphazard and a lot of lawyers were virtually self-taught. I actually don't see that there's been any improvement

Access to equal justice under the law has been restricted to those who can afford lawyers of ever greater, and costlier education. Surely this counts as an improvement for some people.

You could probably also make the argument that the law now manages to settle disputes in an exponentially more complicated society, because of the growth both of technology and the numbers of people.

I won't make that argument, though, because the law seems pretty crappy at dealing with those things, but very good at shutting out people without access to lawyers.

We've been chasing the money for a while now: many people go into law for that reason. Hell, many fields wind up doing it. Might I mention that it sucks.

Book-relatedly, now that things are slowing down for independent used booksellers, the smart person chases those who still have money.

124 -- There are still a couple of states where you can 'read law.'

I love the law, but make active efforts to talk people out of it whenever they show an interest. You really have to like it, because it's so dominant. Ask Idealist how many hours he put in towards his job in the last month.

(Tomorrow it's all about the time sheets, and prep for the Third Geneva Convention argument on Monday. I have a great life in the law, but that doesn't mean I can take a who;e weekend off).

You really have to like it, because it's so dominant.

I don't understand, Charley. Because it's so dominant? Meaning, because it dominates your life?

Mendoza!

Located via celestial navigation!

Just last night eekbeat and I watched the first post-9/11 episode of West Wing. Somehow I'd missed that the first time around. It was...weird.

I gather 133 answers my 134.

I think people try to dissuade people from, say, philosophy, for the same reason. If you're going to do it professionally, it is going to [need to] dominate your life. You live and breathe this stuff.

132, 136: It seems like people say that sort of thing about academia all the time. I expect it's also true of medicine, or politics, or finance. I'm trying to think of what sort of intellectually demanding job it wouldn't be true of.

To all who are passionate about their work and sometimes consumed by their passion, I say: The show must go on!

And no, no more masturbating to Bea Arthur.

137: Right. Yet it's also true of something like bookselling. It can't be done on a punching-the-clock basis. If you know what you're about and you have any intention of succeeding, you spend off time acquiring and reading auction catalogues and reference materials, checking into discussions, keeping up connections with others in the field, and generally living and breathing it.

Any profession is like this, in other words.

I'm really sad about Bea Arthur. She was totally hot.

no more masturbating to Bea Arthur

There's, like, a one-week grace period though, right?

I hope I'm not spilling any guild secrets, but night school for law has always marked the wrong sort of people.

Law is an instrument of social control, and the ABA and law school accreditation has been a way of helping to insure that those with power and money kept it. I remember reading a transcript of an ABA meeting from 1929 in which some member was complaining that if they weren't careful they'd end up practicing alongside people whose fathers sold shoelaces from pushcarts (i.e. Jews).

Until you reach the elevated level where people actually care whether you think that strip searching an adolescent girl is really no worse than changing for a gym class, there's not much intellectual rigor in law. There's not much way to say what the best interpretation of the law is, unless of course the judge, the party, and the party's lawyer all went to the same school and summer in the same places. Then it's perfectly obvious what the result should be.

Schools have always been both a marker, a gate keeper, and an enforcer of the social and class distinctions that help preserve the power relations in society. They do that for law, too. That's why night school - which indicates that you were the wrong sort of person to begin with - remains (to a large, but not complete extent) a door only to the lower levels of the law.

Schneider (forgive the familiarity of address), I've always liked you.

142 is really interesting. Thanks for that POV, MS.

The mayor of Los Angeles attended the People's College of Law, as did the head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and several other lights in the local social justice scene. Granted most of them made their names outside the practice of law.

[blush] You can call me mikey.

145: yes, and they're not senior partners with Cravath, Sidley, and WhiteShoes. They probably learned the law, but their schools did not channel them into the high income, high power, high prestige end of practicing law.

And certainly the system isn't as strict now as it was, nor as strict on the west coast, I suspect.

I think the efforts to keep the Jews out of the legal profession have been unsuccessful, even at the upper echelons.

146: mikey it is!

Seriously, while mikey's explanation smacks of class resentment and such, and partakes of a bit of hyperbole, there's undoubted truth in it, and I'd be surprised if anyone doesn't know it.

Law as discussed here is often higher-end, and doesn't really treat of the kinds of plain old law-trained people Wrongshore describes in 145.

(I'm also, to be completely honest, a bit frustrated by the lawyer bills for the settlement of my mom's estate, the detailed statements for which seem to indicate that there's more time spent on tasks that seem kind of basic than seems called for. I understand, I have contracted with these people to do something for me with which they are far more familiar than I am. Why do I think it shouldn't have taken 5.5 hours to do that thing there, though?)

Class resentment is a good thing, Parsi. And for all we know, Mikey is expressing class guilt.

122:Is chopping wood too abstract for women who knit fancy sweaters ?

Now that I have finished turning many large pieces of wood into small pieces of wood....

31:If woodshop had been presented as a semester-long art elective, instead of a three-week segment of a vo-tech sampler, I bet I would have excelled.

Probably. I have noticed that there were very rarely women in wood or metal shops. They were in plastics tho! (I took shop classes as my personal amusement electives.)

32:After rereading my comment, I'm trying to figure out why I have the patience to cook correctly but not to build a bookcase.

Lack of tools, I'd think. If you really want to make something nice out of wood, you need several large pieces of expensive equipment. Then everything is a snap. Otherwise everything looks crappy.

37: It would be easiest for me to find the nearest dude, who is stronger than me, and have him do something for 3 seconds, get it loose, then let me take back over. But noooooo. It's like once you have one stumbling block, you've admit defeat and you should just let the big man do it.

But this is a known guy thing. You're supposed to figure this shit out yourself, or get reamed. You're supposed to get mean like JM's Dad and keep plugging until you fix it. The special ginourmous 'shitty-screw removing' screwdriver! Visegrips! Dremels! Drills! Even if the fix is shitty!

52: Yeah, who are the people who don't need levels in order to make things level?

Tape measure. Or if you're really a desperate, a sheet of paper and a writing implement! Or your arm and a marker! It just has to visually align. Adapt. Improvise! Overcome! Semper goddamn fi!

66:One of the things that fascinates me about this topic is the social consequences for being wrong. There are some areas that we all have to deal with all the time (laundry, automobiles) where the social consequences of being wrong are very different for men and women. There are others that we have to deal with less often, but still have very gendered expectations. [...] but I'm completely willing to believe that societal perceptions of who is "supposed" to be good at certain kinds of tasks greatly influence children's and teens' ability to experiment with something that they're not yet perfect at. There really are a lot of pipeline problems.

I would think the most obvious case where women are allowed to practice a craft outside of school is in applying makeup, given how many teenage girls get together to practice on each other. Boys Do Not Do That. They are allowed to practice punching each other in the face or throwing hard objects at each other. And I have some vague memory (from childhood) of a girl getting yelled at by her mother for messing up her pretty face with that tomboy business.

max
['Biology, morphology, longevity, incept dates.']

I think the efforts to keep the Jews out of the legal profession have been unsuccessful, even at the upper echelons.

Yes and no. It's important to distinguish the lower class Jews from Eastern Europe who arrived in NYC ca 1880-1920 from the much high class, more assimilated, German Jews who arrived in Boston earlier. Even in the case of the more socially acceptable Jews there were certainly quotas when my parents were adults.

applying makeup, given how many teenage girls get together to practice on each other

Now how do you know about that, Max? That's a source of embarrassment for some of us now, the time we spent learning how to apply makeup.

I would think the most obvious case where women are allowed to practice a craft outside of school is in applying makeup

Oooh, and hairbraiding. I have observed both a significant lack of dexterity (understandable due to total lack of practice) among the dad-friends of mine, as well as overwhelming social pressure to either praise them for "good effort" or have a woman take over and do it for them, especially for single fathers.

151 brings to mind a long-ago incident of complete corporate idiocy, in which an important event was inadvertently scheduled for one of the High Holy Days, and the (non-Jewish) head of the company refused to change it, over the appalled and mutinous heads of his mangers, who saw quite a lot of money going down the drain from decreased attendance.

I don't even think it was overt anti-semitism, just garden-variety stubborn refusal to admit error.

over the appalled and mutinous heads of his mangers

Great typo.

After a bit of belated googling, I'm not sure how tenable my claim in 151 is. On the one hand, Brandeis (although not German); on the other, Frankfurter.

But this is a known guy thing. You're supposed to figure this shit out yourself ... and keep plugging until you fix it.

This also becomes a girly-girl daughter thing if it's simply the family's expected way to deal with problems. TBH I'm not sure we did her any favors, she would be less intimidating to men if she was less competent.

152: That's a source of embarrassment for some of us now, the time we spent learning how to apply makeup.

Why? You learned something didn't you? Anyways, to answer the question girls women talk. When my ex- talked about girlstuff I listened. Also, I would occasionally flip through her issues of Marie Clair and Cosmo and the like. Note here, that it sounds like I'm in trouble for knowing sekrit knowl3dge.

Amazing what you can learn if you merely keep your ears open. {waves to the NSA and like people}

153:as well as overwhelming social pressure to either praise them for "good effort" or have a woman take over and do it for them, especially for single fathers.

And thus we find the reverse of m. leblanc's situation with the screws. Sounds like first mover advantage to me!

max
['Genetics, endocrinology, gender roles, social conditioning: yes!']

157: Why? You learned something didn't you?

I learned something that I can use if I choose to use it. But I learned it because I was supposed to learn and use it, and so I was dedicated to it for some time. That embarrasses me now. Admittedly, it's an eye-rolling kind of embarrassment, not downright shame.

Lack of tools, I'd think. If you really want to make something nice out of wood, you need several large pieces of expensive equipment. Then everything is a snap.

Yeah, but when I learned about building things (generally smaller than a bookcase, but I think we attempted at least one) I was learning with the correct tools. I just never really took to it the way I did cooking, which my parents ensured I learned concurrently. (Parents, I have to say forcing your 10-15 year old to make dinner once every two weeks is a wonderful gift to your child - and a giant sacrifice on your behalf, in terms of time invested and what you end up having to eat. Oh, how terrible were the things I turned out at first, even after a few years of cooking along side both of them).

If you really want to make something nice out of wood, you need several large pieces of expensive equipment. Then everything is a snap. Otherwise everything looks crappy.

Ahem. Ahem.

I do patent law. I like it a lot. Law school typically isn't as important if you do patent law. A lot of this is due to a boom in the value of patents due to the creation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1982. This boom is pretty much over, so who knows what is going to happen now.

We had patent lawyers in our DC office, but they all went to other firms some years ago. Nobody missed them. In the least.

Mergers of patent law firms into general practice firms tend to fail. For patent prosecutors, it is hard to rack up the hours that the general practice firms expect. You really can only pay close attention a certain number of hours in a day and the clients can detect junk billing due to the small project sizes. Plus, there are different docketing and secretarial requirements.

Also, fuck you.

156: This also becomes a girly-girl daughter thing if it's simply the family's expected way to deal with problems.

Sure. But it's not something the culture reinforces.

TBH I'm not sure we did her any favors, she would be less intimidating to men if she was less competent.

I'm not sure she would come outhead being less competent. But then I'm the guy who bought my ex- a 5" stiletto (legal) for one of her birthdays, and got her to practice using it, so I might a lousy judge of the question.

max
['My mother might be crazy but she was (and is) neither stupid nor a wilting violet.']

Yes, if you're really good with the draw-knife, the froe, and the adze you can do anything.

Ahem. Ahem.

Also.

159:Admittedly, it's an eye-rolling kind of embarrassment, not downright shame.

Yeah, I can walk the dog still. No. With a yo-yo. I should be embarrassed? Surely doing makeup is a more useful skill.

I just never really took to it the way I did cooking, which my parents ensured I learned concurrently.

Stuff appeals or it doesn't, I'd expect. I can sew, just badly; no equipment, no training. Stabbing myself in the finger with a needle has always annoyed me though, which I expect has more to do with it.

161: Ahem. Ahem.

Utterly different and vastly more difficult skillset.

max
['And without all the lovely carving, much more crude looking.']

||
Via the NYTimes, good news from Wall Street!

After an Off Year, Wall Street Pay Is Bouncing Back
If the pace set in the first quarter continues all year, the average pay for bankers -- much of it in bonuses -- will rebound from the lows of last year.

Max. I'm not going to argue with you about makeup and the amount of time young girls spend obsessing over it.

132 133

I love the law, but make active efforts to talk people out of it whenever they show an interest. You really have to like it, because it's so dominant. Ask Idealist how many hours he put in towards his job in the last month.

Rumor has it federal judges don't have to work that hard.

51, 52: You mean most people need spirit levels to make things level? My mother - and two-thirds of her children - can do it by eye. My mother has an ability I consider freakish to be able to look at an item of furniture in a store, without a tape measure, and know just from memory not only that it will fit into the place in her house where she wants to put it, but that it will or it won't fit through the doors it will have to be moved through to get it there. None of her children can do that, but my brother and sister can both do home fix-it stuff without spirit levels.

Very funny, apo. I guess that that was pretty low-hanging fruit.

I had the picture of a real physics student as someone who, e.g., felt comfortable with a soldering iron.

I had my biophysicist friend temporarily fix my computer with a soldering iron. I thought about trying to do a similar repair, but I didn't think that I'd be able to handle the movements.

I have since learned that my fine motor skills rank in the bottom 17% of the population. If I could have gotten a disability accommodation, maybe I could have been a lab scientist. (I realize that that wouldn't work.)

Until you reach the elevated level where people actually care whether you think that strip searching an adolescent girl is really no worse than changing for a gym class, there's not much intellectual rigor in law. There's not much way to say what the best interpretation of the law is, unless of course the judge, the party, and the party's lawyer all went to the same school and summer in the same places. Then it's perfectly obvious what the result should be.

All the gate-keeping stuff is reasonable, but this paragraph is precisely backwards. The lower levels of the law, which is where I practice, are more, not less, rigorous than the sort of issues that make it to the Supreme Court. At the trial court level, there's rarely any doubt at all as to what the law is -- sometimes, but it's unusual. 95 out of 100 legal issues are absolutely, clearly settled -- the skill involved is just putting them before the judge so that they know what law it is that properly applies to your facts.

The case I had oral argument in on Friday, the judge looks like he may be planning to get something wrong. That happens, but then it gets fixed on appeal; if he does what I think he's going to do, he will have literally, objectively erred, and the Appellate Division will tell him so when asked.

148: I have contracted with these people to do something for me with which they are far more familiar than I am. Why do I think it shouldn't have taken 5.5 hours to do that thing there, though?)

Try haggling. No guarantees, but clients talk legal bills down all the time, and it's not uncouth or unreasonable to do so (like, I'd feel like a lunatic haggling over a bill for a doctor visit, but lawyers aren't like that.)

ou really have to like it, because it's so dominant.

I almost completely agree with this. I think this is true of most private practice. It's a tough business and it must be very hard for people who do not like what they do. Luckily, I do like what I do.

There are people for whom law is just a 9 to 5 job, but the vast majority of such people be not make big money doing it and I would not enjoy most of the jobs like that, regardless of the money (of course, there are exceptions to all these generalities.).

Ask Idealist how many hours he put in towards his job in the last month.

Without checking, I would say that I billed around 250 hours last month, but April will be lower. Of course, not all the things I do are billable, so there is stuff on top of that 250 I do not keep track of.

At the trial court level, there's rarely any doubt at all as to what the law is -- sometimes, but it's unusual. 95 out of 100 legal issues are absolutely, clearly settled -- the skill involved is just putting them before the judge so that they know what law it is that properly applies to your facts.

Sounds right to me. I decided to become a litigator rather than a transactional lawyer (even though I did transactional work as a summer associate and really liked it) because clerking at an appellate court made me think that litigation was about arguing about the law, and I liked that. Of course, once I became a litigator, I learned that most of litigation is about the facts--both discovering them and presenting them. Turns out I like that even more than the law part.

Try haggling
People often get discounts from us if they are unhappy with the bill. All lawyers know that clients easily can take the work elsewhere.

this paragraph is precisely backwards

Guilty to the charge of aggravating misuse of irony, your Honor.

The law may be settled in the sense that everyone agrees on the words of the test (e.g. was the contract ambiguous? did the defendant have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of whatever?). However, where the test meets the road, in the application of the law to the facts, something far from rigor happens.

In deciding many cases there is a mental process that goes something like this: Party A is like me; I do things the way he does things - we both like stand mixers; Everything I do is reasonable; therefore his expectation of privacy (or misreading of the contract, or whatever) is entirely reasonable.

That's precisely the reason for such imprecise tests, I claim. Too many bright line clear tests (e.g. 'police may never search a vehicle without a warrant based on probable cause; being stopped by police in inherently coercive, rendering consent to search ineffective') would produce the wrong result in far too many cases.

I used the SupCt as my example precisely because a lot of people think that although prejudice and sloppy thinking may be characteristic of magistrate courts, at the higher levels the law does have rigor. I could also point to Yoo and Bybee as people whose prestigeous positions in the law were hardly acheived by the brilliance of their legal reasoning.

Try haggling

A friend reports that he called a lawyer to question a bill, and on the next bill there it was: hourly charge (full rate) for explaining previous bill.

And now, I'm sorry to say, I must flee. Apologies for commenting and running.

||

The guys at airport security were clowning around and in general unusually cheerful. They had written a little song "Keep your boarding passes readyyyyyy" and were telling people that if they put their boarding passes into the x-ray machine, it would be shot into SPACE!" When I asked if I needed to go through the the new fancy backscatter machine that looks at you naked, they said "Only if you want to be shot into SPACE!"

|>

176: That is hilarious. They do sometimes get slaphappy. I had a uniformed army dude with an M16 ask me with elaborate mock seriousness if I hadn't heard of the Twizzler Reclamation Act when he jokingly tried to steal the Twizzlers out of the bag of mine he was searching.

People who have the arbitrary power of life and death over me "clowning around" is not something I enjoy. I once had an apple fall out of my bag as I put it into one of those plastic tubs. The security guy heard it bounce on the ground, picked it up and said "Okay, this has to stay here now." I did not even consider that he might be joking, since the actual rules are no more nonsensical than that.

Then he went around saying "Seriously, whose apple is this? You can have it back." I didn't know if I should admit it or not. Who knows?

134 -- Dominates life. As in . . .

174 -- Yeah, 250 billed, another 100 not billed, and you're running 80 hour weeks. It's a good thing we like it.

175, 172 etc -- The majority of my cases over the last 20 years have involved significant legal issues. I'm known for not liking discovery much, and trying to get associates to take the depositions. (Unless it's politically infeasible -- I've told the story about when I was sent to defend the client's deposition in a case I wasn't working on: no better signal can be sent that we don't care about the client).

148 -- The big problem with hourly billing for a quick, yet consequential task: If I advise you on some legal matter, and I get it wrong, I might well be on the hook for the $250,000 my error costs you. Suddenly my $1,500 worth of time making sure there hasn't been a change in the law, or isn't some strange fact-dependent wrinkle, doesn't seem to me like such a bad idea.

172

The case I had oral argument in on Friday, the judge looks like he may be planning to get something wrong. That happens, but then it gets fixed on appeal; if he does what I think he's going to do, he will have literally, objectively erred, and the Appellate Division will tell him so when asked.

In a criminal case the appeals court may decide the judge erred but that the error was "harmless" and the trial result stands. What happens with civil case errors?

172

All the gate-keeping stuff is reasonable, but this paragraph is precisely backwards. The lower levels of the law, which is where I practice, are more, not less, rigorous than the sort of issues that make it to the Supreme Court. At the trial court level, there's rarely any doubt at all as to what the law is -- sometimes, but it's unusual. 95 out of 100 legal issues are absolutely, clearly settled -- the skill involved is just putting them before the judge so that they know what law it is that properly applies to your facts.

But doesn't any case involve hundreds of legal points so if even 5% are unsettled aren't there lots of things to argue about?

People who have the arbitrary power of life and death over me "clowning around" is not something I enjoy.

Recently I was traveling on a new passport that had taken me a lot of anguish and money to obtain. The security lady took a look at it and said, "This passport isn't valid." I nearly had a heart attack. Then she laughed and said, "See, you didn't sign it! Ha HA! I get people like this all the time!" I wasn't really in a position to tell her that it wasn't funny.

Speaking of gender gaps:

Men have lost almost 80 per cent of the 5.1m jobs that have gone in the US since the recession started, pushing the male unemployment rate to 8.8 per cent. The female jobless rate has hit 7 per cent.

Not that I know what "jobless rate" means, of course.

Recently I was traveling on a new passport that had taken me a lot of anguish and money to obtain. The security lady took a look at it and said, "This passport isn't valid." I nearly had a heart attack. Then she laughed and said, "See, you didn't sign it! Ha HA! I get people like this all the time!" I wasn't really in a position to tell her that it wasn't funny.

Cripes. Meanwhile she is probably surrounded by signs reminding passengers that any jokes they make will be taken with the utmost seriousness.

To TSA employees reading this: Even if you're a hideous parody of an authority figure, you're still an authority figure. Just be polite.

People who have the arbitrary power of life and death over me whether I get to board the plane or not

180 -- Oh, a harmless error will not prevent affirmance in a civil case either. Wags joke that the judges of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals (our intermediate court) have a macro on their computers -- Control-H most likely -- that spits out an opinion affirming on harmless error grounds. Of course they don't even need to do that when they can hit Control-P: failure to preserve the error at trial.

With regard to the second, it's quite common that there will different lawyers on appeal -- Di and Will can cite examples, I am sure, where trial counsel really gave them a mission impossible for reasons that seemed, at trial, trivial. My favorite instance is from an appeal that we inheirted from another firm where there were two straight up obvious reversible errors: a jury instruction that obviously misstated the applicable starting date for the limitations period to run, and the refusal to allow testimony regarding the opposing party's attempt to bribe a witness. Control-P

A wonks-only follow-on to 188.2(a):

The claim was breach of fiduciary duty. It arose from a sale of property. Owner was told that for Buyer's tax reasons, the sale had to be made to Straw Party which would then sell, immediately, to Buyer at a markup. Owner agreed to do it. Only much later did Owner find out that Buyer had been told that the initial transfer Straw Party was for Owner's purposes, and that in fact Straw Party was half owner by an officer in Owner.

When does the statute begin to run? Is it (a) when Owner learns of and agrees to the intermediate transfer to Straw Party, or (b) when Owner learns that Straw Party is his own people cheating him?

186: How fortunate you are to know that you will never be one of the people who gets arbitrarily arrested at a US airport.

I haven't attempted to enter the US since the US government made clear they considered that until a transit passenger had actually passed Customs and Immigration, non-US citizens have zero legal rights and can, in fact, arbitrarlly be put under arrest, sent to a concentration camp, and tortured: without any legal recourse or any right to compensation or any penalty whatsoever for the agents of the US government who might do this to me.

(I'm planning to go to Montreal this August. I haven't used a travel agent since 1997, but I'm using one to book my tickets this year: I want to make absolutely clear to the agency that under no circumstances whatsoever will I book a ticket that causes me to pass through any US airport.)

When my dad went to law school, the program was still pretty new and I think only operated at night (his degrees are an AB and an LLM, to give some idea of the dates involved). He's argued at the state supreme court and been admitted to argue at the US supreme court. That there's a stigma against people who go to law school at night just indicates to me that we've become a much wealthier, more leisurely society. This is a distinction not worth making if the course work is equal.

192 -- I started out as very strongly anti-elite law school -- a position that would seem obvious for me -- since we all use the same textbooks, and the course outlines from one school to another are materially indistinguishible. I have since changed position pretty substantially. The actual law part of the work -- as noted above, and as experienced by nearly everyone -- is only a part of what you're being hired to do. Being a good lawyer is necessary but not sufficient to success. Having classmates who end up in the right places to send you work is awfully valuable.

I did very well in my lower tiered (but not bottom level) school, got a good job, and have made a fair career of it. But no one I went to school with is, 18 years out, in a place to do me much good. I would imagine that Georgetown would have been better for that.

LB at 173:

148: I have contracted with these people to do something for me with which they are far more familiar than I am. Why do I think it shouldn't have taken 5.5 hours to do that thing there, though?)

Try haggling. No guarantees, but clients talk legal bills down all the time, and it's not uncouth or unreasonable to do so (like, I'd feel like a lunatic haggling over a bill for a doctor visit, but lawyers aren't like that.)

This reply is coming late, but I must ask: really? I've just received the newest bill, and it really does seem absurd, the amount of time the paralegal is spending to 'review' things. I am not sure how to begin to address this, as even a simple email back and forth (me: "I gather the Probate Court sent the Certificate of Appointment of me as executor of my mom's estate to you over a week ago. Could you forward that to me? I will be needing that for any number of things." her: "Yes, tax time was stressful, sorry for the delay, and I've been preparing a detailed memo regarding the next stage")

A simple back and forth like this will result in a $75 charge for that email exchange (.50 hours of her time), and god knows how much for this detailed memo which may or may not include excessive detail that I may or may need, since I am also receiving mailings from the Probate Court. I'm not a child.

LB, or anyone else, how does one go about telling one's lawyers that it's getting to be a bit much?

174.last: Yes, my brother and I have already been talking about finding another lawyer for the additional things we need to do.

She didn't spend 30 minutes reading your email and formulating that response. And her lawyer won't argue that she did.

193 - Yeah, I'm not so naïve as to think this question is weighed on the merits. Like everything else in life, it's as much about who you know as what you know. But I also know that the degree from Top Ten Law doesn't make you a good litigator.

But then I also joke that I never met any lawyers who weren't trial lawyers until I moved to DC (which is full of people with law degrees who never argue cases). My perspective on the practice of law (as a lawyer's kid) is very different than that of the Top Ten Law -> Federal Court Clerk -> Big Name Firm people I know here. I know a lot of old lawyers back home, and every single one of them tries cases in court. Around DC you could throw rocks at ten lawyers and only one of them would actually be a practicing litigator.

Around DC you could throw rocks at ten lawyers

And if everybody did this, we'd really be getting somewhere.

195: Charley, I have a more detailed question: if I haggle with them, should it be in a general way (i.e. my brother and I really cannot afford this and are becoming alarmed) or should it be targeted to specific charges? With respect to the latter, I don't feel qualified to claim that this or that piece of collating and reviewing of paperwork shouldn't have taken 2.90 hours (at, therefore, a cost of $435.00).

Surely just a general statement.

This will be deleted soon.

ToS, don't hit me when I'm down. That's rude.

186: How fortunate you are to know that you will never be one of the people who gets arbitrarily arrested at a US airport.

We're talking about the 12 dollar an hour people working the security scanner. Yes, low level scrubs in any job joke around a bit to try and make the job bearable. Sometimes they are inappropriate.

They're the law enforcement equivalent of fast food workers. Power of life and death my ass. They confiscate lotion and nail clippers.

198 -- It's their job to justify the charges. You can do both: we're on a shoestring here, and can't pay what looks to us like excessive costs. It shouldn't take 30 minutes to read and respond (with a non-response) to an email. I don't understand why it would take 3 hours to collate the 25 page X document . . .

201: Okay. That takes some research on my part, to make a claim that a given charge seems excessive. But okay.

What really chaps my ass is that if I write an email to the paralegal about this, she's gonna charge me some amount just to read and confer with various people and reply. This is obnoxious, to be honest. I'm on the verge of not being on speaking terms (it costs me money to talk to them), yet I gather this is standard legal fee structure.

198: I'm not actually sure -- I've never handled the billing end of a case so I don't know how haggling usually happens, just that it does. But my instincts are with yours -- general objections, and look for a percentage discount. If you get too specific, I'd worry about the lawyer arguing that "Actually, that charge is perfectly reasonable," and winning the argument. If you're just complaining about the total, that's not an argument they can be 'right' about.

180, 181: A brief on a dispositive motion, one that can bring the case to an end, will usually not have more than three or four main points. You'd get to 'hundreds' of legal issues only in either a very unusual case, or if you were literally counting every little uncontested point of law, and even then not really.

Harmless error is real, but it means pretty much that the court would have come to the same decision even if the error hadn't been made. It comes up more in appeals after trial than on appeals from decisions on motions; I've worked almost exclusively on trial court cases that got decided on motions, or appeals from motions, so I don't have much of a sense of how appeals after trial play out. On the sorts of cases I've worked on, you don't get surprised by an appellate court calling something harmless error.

And 175 is a much better statement of how the legal system works in favor of people with whom the judge sympathizes.

202: I wouldn't email the paralegal about the bill, because she can't change it. Talk to the lawyer, and make it clear that you won't be happy if you're billed for a conversation about how you're unhappy with the bill.

204: Right. And thanks.

Can I just say that the lawyerly establishment doesn't present itself well when this is the sort of thing that arises? I do not want to have an adversarial relationship with my lawyer. It's quite clear to me that in the kind of very straightforward situation I have, it should not be costing close to $4,000 to date to settle an estate that's very straightforward.

205

And 175 is a much better statement of how the legal system works in favor of people with whom the judge sympathizes.

Speaking of which, here is a story about how the legal system really works.

God, you lawyers have it easy. At my (thankfully former) employer, a small consulting company, our services were not routine expenses for clients; we charged hourly, but with the total amount roughly predetermined. One time we got involved in a less bounded project, with an indispensable subcontractor possibly getting greedy, and God how we sweated over justifying those extra hours.

I think there's always a stigma.

Is Georgetown's night law school looked down on? It seems to be popular among Capitol Hill staffers.

In California you can work for a lawyer and read for the bar. They also have California accredited law schools in addition to ABA accredited schools.

Those people have to take a Baby Bar exam which is basically an exam covering the standard first year curriculum. They don't want people continuing who are obviously going to fail.

On the topic of the OP: I think one of the major issues with women in physics is the dick factor. Physics disproportionately attracts people who are socially immature* and funnels them into classes that are skewed by gender in ways that make acquisition of appropriate social skills less likely. Physics is also highly competitive: a lot of people go into physics at least in part because it's an area where they can reliably outshine others, or because they want to prove themselves. Throw in patriarchal social norms and you have the perfect environment for constant low level sexual harassment and borderline behavior aimed at women classmates that simply wears a person down over time. If I'd been a woman I'd have ditched physics before grad school and probably gone into Comp Sci.

My cousin is a computer engineer who works with physicists. Perhaps she's been able to survive surrounded by dicks because she's more or less asexual and extremely overweight, therefore men in that setting behave no worse to her than men in any other setting would.

Based on my experience in a research hospital, people underestimate how workaholic, perfectionist, and competitive research scientists are. Some are wimpy and nerdy and some aren't, but a very high proprotion of them have an intense drive which impacts their relationships with all other human beings. Some of them only respect their superiors in the field, and even them they're competing with. Their peers are all competitors.

Some of them live in a split world where they're deadheads i=or indy music buffs in their off hours, but the other side is always just beneath the surface.

There are exceptions, I'm sure, but I was surprised by a lot of people I met there when I got to know them a little.

210: Yeah, my friend who is a patent attorney went to grad school for engineering right after law school. He was more or less floored by the rapid change of ethos, and this was all at the same university. The law school was avowedly feminist and in the engineering school the professors pretty much felt free to make tit jokes during lecture.

If I'd been a woman I'd have ditched physics before grad school and probably gone into Comp Sci.

As a Comp Sci. major I really can't see how that jump could be an improvement.

214: Really? The impression I get is that Comp Sci has a better (but not good) gender balance and many more role models (Ada Lovelace!).

Comp Sci has a better (but not good) gender balance and many more role models (Ada Lovelace!)

My undergrad classes where probably all over 90% male. The environment also seems to match how you describe the physics class environment. There is a push in industry and professional organizations to get more women into CS, but no one seems to have figured out a clear way to do it yet.

Granted I haven't hung around in the physics environment much so maybe it is worse, but I would have a hard time imagining it.