Abstract:
Women as lawyers have become common all around the world. The feminization of the legal labor market has occurred and continues to happen within practically all countries. Being a lawyer, a career that used to attain an elevated status, reduced the value in the similar moment that started to feminized. This reality has not passed unscathed by the academy. In the late 1980s, Menkel-Meadow (1989) published an article on the feminization of Legal Profession. The paper regarded the significant increase in the presence of women in the role of a lawyer in the Western world and particularly in the United States.
In 1997, Margareth Thorton published an article discussing the feminization lawyers in Australia and the glass ceiling phenomenon. Thorton’s work inspired the Junqueira (1999) to discuss the difficulties experienced by the women in the practice of a lawyer in Brazilian offices.
Neoliberalism caused the precariousness of work worldwide. The last decades of the 20th century were the expansion of globalization and the decrease of worker’s value. This circumstance caused workers to give up their rights and guarantees, and to reduce income. Simultaneously, women experienced the most significant entry into the urban professional labor market.
The legal labor market was also hit by the devaluation of the workforce, while the new professionals started to be women. This paper aims to discuss how much the precariousness of lawyer’s work has a relation with the feminization of law schools and the increase of women as lawyers.
Speaker:
Prof. Monica Sapucaia Machado, Professor Ph.D. Instituto Brasiliense de Direito Público, Law Dept.
Monica Sapucaia Machado, PhD in Political and Economic Law, Professor of Constitutional Law and Gender at the Brasiliense Institute of Public Law. Author of the book Women’s Law: Higher Education, Work and Autonomy and the Women’s Rights Collection.