Women’s History Month: Reflecting on Success and Confronting Barriers

PRESIDENT'S COLUMN

BY KENNON WOOTEN, SCOTT DOUGLASS & McCONNICO

Women’s History Month is a time to celebrate the contributions women have made to our country and to recognize women’s achievements in a variety of fields. It is also a time to reflect upon the barriers women have overcome in the past and the barriers we confront to this day. This mental exercise evokes images of trailblazers who opened doors for others, 1 and it elicits thoughts of the rising stars among us and of the things we can each do to work toward equality for women.

The legal field is, and always has been, filled with remarkable women. Texas alone provides many examples of women who ventured bravely into uncharted territory. A few of “the firsts” follow:

• Special Chief Justice Hortense Sparks Ward, Special Associate Justice Hattie Leah Henenberg, and Special Associate Justice Ruth Virginia Brazzil, who convened in 1925 (due to recusals) as the first all-woman high court in the United States, specifically as a special Texas Supreme Court panel, to hear a case involving the fraternal organization Woodmen of the World; 2

• Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who became the first female federal judge in Texas in 1961;

• Barbara Jordan, who was the first Black female lawyer elected to the Texas Senate in 1966;

• Irma L. Rangel, who became the first Mexican American woman to be elected to the Texas Legislature in 1976;

• Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a native Texan who served—between 1981 and 2006—as the first woman associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; and

• Judge Karen Gren Scholer, who—in 2018—became the first Asian Pacific American to serve as a federal district-court judge in Texas. 3

The 1925 "All Woman" Court: (from left) Justice Ruth Brazzil; Chief Justice Hortense Ward; and Justice Hattie Henenberg.

Photo credit: TSLAC.

The list of trailblazers in Texas goes on and on. There are also countless rising stars among us. Yet, in and beyond Texas, barriers to success still exist for women. The COVID-19 pandemic recession has highlighted this reality in our labor force, both in and beyond the legal field, and it has raised many questions. What is happening? Why are women being impacted more than men? Is there a way to reverse the trend and emerge stronger than we were before? It is too soon to answer these questions fully, but now is the time to analyze the situation and look for opportunities.

The National Women’s Law Center reported recently that over 2.3 million women have left the labor force since February 2020, as compared with the nearly 1.8 million men who left in that same time period. 4 Women of color have experienced disproportionately negative impacts. 5 And women in the law certainly have not been immune to the employment crisis during the pandemic. In a recent American Bar Association article, the author drove this point home, stating: “[S]napshots from across the country show women lawyers encountering a vast range of daunting issues related to the coronavirus outbreak, ranging from stress to income loss, additional caregiving responsibilities, isolation, and hours that don’t stop.” 6

Some economists have predicted that the gender wage gap will widen throughout the recovery from the pandemic recession, but those same economists have indicated that the recession could ultimately reduce gender gaps in the labor market. 7 They attributed this potential reduction to things like fathers increasing the time spent on childcare during the pandemic, a rise in the number of couples in which the husband is the primary childcare provider, and the adoption of remote-working arrangements during the pandemic. 8 Interestingly, their assessment relating to increased time spent on childcare was based in part on “existing evidence from policy-induced increases in father[s’] contributions to childcare (e.g., through paternity leave)[,]” which, to them, “suggest[s] that the rise in men’s engagement during the crisis will result in a higher involvement of fathers in childcare in the future, and a corresponding greater ability of mothers to pursue their careers[.]” 9

As a woman observing women losing decades of labor-force gains in less than a year, I want to believe that, ultimately, women will restore prior gains and come out better than they were before. As a mom married to a man who took 12 weeks of paternity leave and who has been the primary childcare provider in our home, I do believe that one way to be better than we were before, collectively, is to implement and support (without stigma, shame, or blame) policies giving all parents—moms and dads alike—the opportunity to take leave for childcare, regardless of whether such leave is required by the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, or any other law. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.”

While the pandemic has led to immeasurable loss and struggle, it also has reinforced that support systems are invaluable to our individual success as women and, therefore, our collective success as a society. We can emerge from this pandemic better than we were before if we work together and support the helpers among us, regardless of gender. So, let’s use this month to celebrate our victories and ponder possibilities for the betterment of women and of our broader community. AL

Footnotes

1. For a neat collection of trailblazers’ oral histories, go to https://abawtp. law.stanford.edu/—a website launched for the Women Trailblazers in the Law Oral History Project of the American Bar Association’s Senior Law Division.

2. Ward was also the first woman to pass the bar examination for the State Bar of Texas (in 1910) and the first Texas woman admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court (in 1915). For interesting biographies of these women and all other Texas justices, go to https:// tarltonapps.law.utexas.edu/justices/.

3. This article barely scratches the surface of these women’s accomplishments. I encourage all readers to learn more about them. When writing this article, I spent hours reading about them and felt both moved and inspired.

4. https://nwlc.org/resources/januaryjobs-day-2021/.

5. https://nwlc.org/resources/2020- jobs-day-reports/.

6. Cynthia L. Cooper, Work-Life Imbalance: Pandemic Disruption Places New Stresses on Women Lawyers, Am. Bar Ass’n, Dec. 18, 2020, https:// www.americanbar.org/groups/ diversity/women/publications/ perspectives/2021/december/ worklife-imbalance-pandemicdisruption-places-new-stresseswomen-lawyers/.

7. See generally Titan Alon et al., This Time It’s Different: The Role of Women’s Employment in a Pandemic Recession, (Nat’l Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper No. 27660©, Aug. 2020), https://www.nber. org/system/files/working_papers/ w27660/w27660.pdf.

8. Id. at 4.

9. Id. at 38.