“Even when the path is nominally open –where there is nothing to prevent women from becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant – there are many phantoms andobstacles as I believe looming in her way…To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance. For only then can the labor be shared and difficulties solved.”
-Virginia Woolf
“Cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex. If the reason for a law ceases, the law itself must cease. I hope the women in your class will seek out laws and unwritten rules that no longer serve a purpose and help lead us to new rules that will better serve everyone.”
-Amy Weaver, General Counsel, Salesforce
Western civilization’s vision of a leader grew out of heroic epics: The Iliad and The Odyssey- a brave warrior leading by example in the Trojan War. The warrior-leader model is still part of our public conscience, but the idea that leadership is a divine or masculine trait has long been debunked. At a time of global public reckoning, more must be done to develop a woman lawyer-statesman vision of leadership, to elevate the study of women's leadership to a higher intellectual plane, and help shape a more inclusive research agenda for the next generation of leaders, leadership scholars, and practitioners.
“Despite the primary focus on women’s leadership in law and business, we explored gender as only one axis of difference and expanded our analysis to cover the shape-shifting nature of leadership across political economies and across different periods of socio-economic change.”
These interviews by the members of the class on Women, Law, and Leadership offer analysis and insights into some of the most significant changes in leadership from a gender perspective. Despite the primary focus on women’s leadership in law and business, we explored gender as only one axis of difference and expanded our analysis to cover the shape-shifting nature of leadership across political economies and across different periods of socio-economic change. Nonetheless, the overarching theme remains that global and transnational transformations impact women’s work in law and business in the US. By interviewing women from different generations both in terms of age and political shifts, the narratives attempt to capture the richness of different gender perspectives across geography, race, ethnicity, religious, cultural, and political diversity in women’s leadership, its underlying tensions, intersectionalities, and commonalities.