The Mismeasure of Success
Rubin Gomez, A. (2021). Mismeasure of Success. St. John's Law Review, 94.
What it says
- Perhaps even more than scientific fields, the legal profession sees talented, credentialed women leaving the field and being underrepresented at the highest levels. This essay argues that this follows, in part, from the way that success is defined and measured.
- By tying evluation and advancement to the number of billable hours, law firms necessarily select for those lawyers who are in a position to put in these hours whenever needed. As Gomez writes, "The view of women as the problem epitomizes why large law firms continue to struggle to retain women lawyers. It is not because the firms intend to view women as problematic. It is simply that women are expected to act like men to succeed."
What we might learn from it
- To make transformational change in a system and institution with long-standing inequities, it is critical to examine and challenge the assumptions underlying those structures. When the standard metrics themselves privilege one group, then it will be difficult to address the inequities without also changing those metrics.
- Just as Gomez questions whether the legal profession is best served by measuring success through billable hours and by incentizing imbalanced work-life arrangements, we in academia should consider the ways that standard metrics for students, academic staff, and faculty may mislead or reinforce existing inequities.
- Recently many schools have reconsidered their undergraduate and graduate admissions policies, recognizing that standardized test scores may reveal more about socioeconomic status than objective college preparation.
- Numerous studies have raised concerns about how high stakes exams may disadvantage women in STEM and there are quite possibly other ways in which traditional assessments and other academic metrics are inequitable.
- And this is not to even mention the most obvious parallels with the subject of the Gomez essay: tenure-track professors and the ways in which they are selected and promoted.