+ Accidental Feminism

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.

+ Diversity in U.S. Legal Education

The second line of inquiry concentrates on emerging trends in U.S. legal education and organizational diversity. Across a set of projects, colleagues and I build on earlier research to reveal the ways in which new kinds of diversity are demanding a rethinking of current legal institutions. The main site for this research has been an inquiry into the rising number of international students in U.S. mainstream (i.e. J.D.) programs and the implications this has had for both law schools and individual students alike. This research (along with Carole Silver) uses legal education as one more landscape to theorize about the concepts of institutional inequality in an increasingly globalizing profession. The motivation for this body of work lies directly in the implications of its underlying empirics. International students have, especially in the last few decades, earned their place as serious actors in any conversation about the globalization of law. They are currently over 3% of the JD population across all ABA approved law schools (and 6% of the population in the top-20 law schools), with an increasing number of law schools with more international students than other kinds of minority students. Yet, even as these numbers continue to grow, we know little about this population and their experience. Our research begins to fill this gap.

My most recent project (with Carole Silver, Anthony Paik, and Steven Boutcher), uses these findings from earlier research to inform a multi-method empirical investigation into the kinds of networks that enable law student entry, experience, and success. Our first two waves of data collection were funded by the AccessLex Foundation, and we have just been greenlit for Waves 3 and 4 by the NSF.