Check out this event—which was hosted by the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession (CERLP) and the American Bar Foundation (ABF)—featuring CLP affiliate faculty and assistant professor at the UC Irvine School of Law Swethaa Ballakrishnen, who talked about their latest book, Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India’s Professional Elite (Princeton 2021).
Introduction by UCI Law Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and CERLP Co-Director, Bryant Garth, with comments by: Ronit Dinovitzer, Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto and ABF Faculty Fellow; Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean and Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law; and Susan Sturm, George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility, Columbia Law School; with a toast by David Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School.
Publisher’s Description
In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country’s lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces?
Drawing from observations and interviews with more than 130 elite professionals, Accidental Feminism examines how a range of underlying mechanisms—gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories—afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, Swethaa Ballakrishnen reveals that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organizations, but from structural factors that incidentally come together to do gender differently. Simultaneously, their research offers notes of caution: while conditional convergence may create equality in ways that more targeted endeavors fail to achieve, “accidental” developments are hard to replicate, and are, in this case, buttressed by embedded inequalities. Ballakrishnen examines whether gender parity produced without institutional sanction should still be considered feminist.
In offering new ways to think about equality movements and outcomes, Accidental Feminism forces readers to critically consider the work of intention in progress narratives.
