Law Office Sociology – A while back I had occasion (or at least took the opportunity) to discuss “law office history,” generally regarded as history written using evidence carefully filtered to support a pre-determined conclusion. (See here and here.) I did not defend this sort of history but argued that it was not limited to — and perhaps was not even prevalent in — law offices, that much academic history demonstrated the same traits.
Now comes Kathleen Wu, identified as “a commercial real estate lawyer and managing partner in the Dallas office of Houston’s Andrews & Kurth,” who gives perfect voice in The Texas Lawyer to what might be called, with justified derision, “law office sociology.”
Her topic is a recent spate of books that discuss aggression and general nastiness in teenage girls (she cites them; I don’t care about them, and so won’t). She doesn’t like these books. She apparently wishes they hadn’t been published. But she doesn’t criticize their evidence, argument, or conclusions. Indeed, she even admits, “[my] complaint with this body of research isn’t that it’s invalid (from what I can tell, it seems to be based on some solid research….)”
So, what’s Wu want?
My complaint is that, despite the authors’ best intentions, their work ends up doing little more than solidifying the negative stereotypes that have dogged women for centuries.
And by solidifying those stereotypes, they may slow the already glacial pace of creating the kind of support network for women in business that has been the cornerstone of success for men in business.
Her problem with these books, in short, is that they don’t
get women in the real world any closer to where we need to be, which is firmly ensconced in a network of professionals who, without even thinking about it, refer business to each other and generally support one another’s professional goals.
Good scholarship, on this view, is whatever gets women (or blacks, Jews, Moldavians, Muslims, or your group of choice) where Wu or we want them to be. Unfortunately, this attitude is not rare, and it’s just as likely to be found on campus as in law offices.
