Deborah L. Rhode

Speaking of Sex examines patterns of gender inequality across a wide array of social, legal, and public policy settings. Challenging conventional biological explanations for gender differences, Rhode explores the media images and childrearing practices that reinforce traditional gender stereotypes. On policies involving employment, divorce, custody, rape, pornography, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and reproductive choice, Speaking of Sex reveals how we continually overlook the gap between legal rights and daily experience. All too often, even Americans who condemn gender inequality in principle cannot see it in practice - in their own lives, homes, and work environments. In tracing these patterns, Rhode uncovers the deeply ingrained assumptions that obscure and perpetuate women's disadvantages.

"No occupation in America supplies a greater proportion of leaders than law. They obviously lead law firms, but they also sit at the helm of a vast and diverse array of businesses across America, including 10 percent of S & P 500 firms. And of course, a strikingly large percentage of our political leaders are attorneys, including half the members of Congress. This raises two obvious questions: why do we look to lawyers to lead, and why do so many of them prove to be so untrustworthy and unprepared? In Lawyers as Leaders, eminent law professor Deborah Rhode not only answers these questions but crafts an essential manual for attorneys who need to develop better leadership skills. She contends that the legal profession attracts a large number of individuals with the ambition and analytic capabilities to be leaders, but often fails to develop other qualities that are essential to their effectiveness. The focus of legal education and the reward structure of legal practice undervalue the interpersonal skills and ethical commitments necessary for successful leadership. Although some lawyers are sufficiently gifted to need little reinforcement, Rhode shows that the vast majority of law school graduates need to develop the leadership characteristics that she profiles. They know it too. According to one survey, almost 90 percent of attorneys stated that their law schools did not teach them leadership skills. Given the importance of the topic, it is surprising how little the profession has done to develop leadership skills. The first serious treatment of the subject, Lawyers as Leaders will be essential to law school instructors who teach leadership courses (a growing field) and any attorney who finds him or herself in a management position."--pub. desc.

A woman around her thirties begins to question the routine and predictability of her days. In everybody's eyes, she has a perfect life: a solid and stable marriage, a loving husband, sweet and well-behaved children and a job as a journalist she can't complain about. However, she can no longer bear the necessary effort to fake happiness when all she feels in life is an enormous apathy. All that changes when she encounters an ex-boyfriend from her adolescence. Jacob is now a successful politician and, during an interview, he ends up arousing something in her she hadn't felt for a long time: passion.

"Based on a leadership summit sponsored by the American Bar Association Office of the President, the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, and the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University"--T.p. verso.