International Women’s Day

March 10, 2014April 1, 2014

LIDS’ Women’s Day Exhibit Featured in the Harvard Gazette

The Harvard Gazette has written a piece on our International Women’s Day exhibit at Harvard Law School (which runs until March 13). The piece features Maria Parra-Orlandoni, our co-Vice President of Communications, who nominated Dana H. Born, a lecturer at the Kennedy School and retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General, for the exhibit. The article also quotes LIDS co-President Becky Wolozin, one of the exhibit’s extraordinary organizers, on what inspired her to put together this initiative. (Click on this post’s headline to see a link to the article.)

March 7, 2014April 1, 2014

Women at Work: A Post in Honor of International Women’s Day

March 7, 2014 – Sarah Weiner

One morning, while getting ready for work—at a leisurely, “island” pace that law school no longer affords—Vai Leka showed up on my doorstep wanting to go with me. My two-year-old neighbor was going through a stage of stealing her father’s shoes, and the photo I snapped of her, pencils in tow, ready for work, is one of my favorites from the two years I spent in Tonga as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Having researched women’s rights in developing countries during college, I arrived in Tonga keenly aware of its gender inequalities. However, as I settled in to my village, I of course realized that I knew little about the way men and women actually interacted in day-to-day life in the small archipelago. Women actively participated in town meetings, ran stores, and trekked into the capital for their coveted government jobs. Furthermore, my conversations with them revealed that the women in my village wanted the same thing as the men: a way to support their families and opportunities for their children to do the same.

One theme of Professor David Kennedy’s course at Harvard on Law and Economic Development is that development is about making hard choices—prioritizing certain policies based on your idea of what brings about development (and what development means) under the reality of limited resources. Reflecting back, this is exactly what I had to do. Not that it wouldn’t have been a worthy pursuit, but my time in the Peace Corps was not the time to be advocating for gender equality under the law. It was the time to be teaching children and youth—girls and boys—English, computer, and other skills that would help them compete for Tonga’s limited jobs.

Perhaps that is why a recent World Bank report, Gender at Work caught my eye. It calls for bold action to address the inequality that exists between men and women in the sphere of work. It focuses on making the economic case against exclusion, so the argument resonates both with people who see development as an increase in GDP and those who see development as improvements in human rights. Among its many findings is that in 128 countries, there is at least one law that contains a sex-based differentiation, “meaning women and men cannot function in the world of work in the same way.” There are five or more such differences in 54 countries.

At yesterday’s kick-off for the LIDS-WLA International Women’s Day exhibit at Harvard Law School, Inspiring Change, Inspiring Us, Dean Martha Minow suggested that perhaps by “changing the pictures on the wall, we can change biases.” Symbolism can be powerful. Changing the pictures on the wall matters, as does changing the laws on the books. Maybe Vai Leka, so eager to go off to work with me in her father’s shoes, will grow up to be Tonga’s first female Prime Minister. Or maybe she will be a teacher that inspires her students to change the course of Tonga’s history. And maybe she can become this woman in the current environment. But we owe it to girls like Vai to remove obstacles in their way so that all girls—in developed and developing countries alike—have a chance at joining the large group of women around the world that “inspire change and inspire us.”

March 3, 2014

LIDS to Celebrate International Women’s Day with Exhibit Featuring Inspirational Women Lawyers from Around the World

March 3, 2014 – Raj Banerjee

This March, Harvard Law School will celebrate International Women’s Day by featuring a series of portraits of inspirational women lawyers and policy makers from around the world. For two weeks beginning March 3, the law school’s Wasserstein Hall will host over sixty portraits of academics, judges, activists, public servants, corporate lawyers and businesswomen, all nominated by members of the law school community.

The portrait series, entitled Inspiring Change, Inspiring Us, grew out of a conversation between members of the Harvard Law &International Development Society (LIDS) and the Harvard Women’s Law Association (WLA) this past winter. Both organizations wanted to commemorate International Women’s Day—celebrated for decades on March 8 of each year—and were looking for ways to collaborate on campus. The idea for a portrait exhibition soon reached Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, who offered her unconditional support. In the weeks since then, the portrait series has brought the entire law school community together: dozens of students and faculty members nominated women to be featured in the exhibition; seventeen student organizations have agreed to sponsor portraits; and staff members from the law school’s Dean of Students Office, Communications Office, Facilities Maintenance Operations, Copy Center, and the Harvard Law School Library have invested their time and resources to bring the project to fruition.

The resulting collaboration celebrates women lawyers and policymakers from six continents, from judges in the United States, Brazil, and Botswana to rights activists from across Latin America and Asia; from academics in Australia to corporate lawyers in India to leaders at the United Nations and the European Union. Some of the featured women, such as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Senator Elizabeth Warren, are household names in the United States. Others are lesser known including women like Bayan Mahmoud Al-Zahran, who has established Saudi Arabia’s first all-female law firm; and Nigerian human rights lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim, a top proponent of women’s rights under Sharia law. For Becky Wolozin, ’15, one of the exhibit’s organizers, “the most exciting nominations were women in students’ knew personally – their mothers, grandmothers, mentors – the unsung heroines in our lives.”

Each woman will be featured on campus and on an online exhibit, at the following website: https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/womeninspiringchange/. The website will also feature podcasts from several nominators, explaining why and how their nominees inspire them.

Inspiring Change, Inspiring Us will be open to the public, and on display from March 3 to March 14. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 6, at Milstein West, in Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall, from 11am to 1pm. The reception is open to all members of the Harvard community.

For more information on the exhibition, please visit https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/womeninspiringchange or receive updates via Twitter @HarvardLIDS or by looking for the hashtags #HLSinspiringchange and #inspiringchange.

LIDS and WLA, the student groups behind the exhibition, would like to thank Dean Martha Minow; Harvard Law School’s Dean of Students Ellen Cosgrove and her staff; and staff at the school’s Communications Office, Facilities Maintenance Operations, Copy Center, and the Harvard Law School Library.

The exhibition is largely funded by a generous grant from the Harvard Law School Milbank Tweed fund.