Absinthe
Living my life as an exclamation, not an explanation...
It should be noted by readers that Absinthe is not a lawyer,
and anything posted in this blog should not be used as a
substitute for professional advice from a lawyer
If you have read the previous post, and decided that suing is for you despite all the drawbacks, your next step is to find a good lawyer. I had an absolute nightmare of a time trying to find a lawyer (and, because my first attorney fell gravely ill, I had to go through the process twice).
The problem in finding a discrimination lawyer when you work for a university (particularly state universities) is that lawyers know that the universities have infinitely deep litigation pockets (at least compared to the Plaintiff). Thus the attorneys know that the likelihood that the Plaintiff will be able to monetarily survive long enough in the lawsuit to actually prevail is probably pretty low. So they really don't want to take such cases. They would rather litigate discrimination lawsuits against small companies and the like, where the chances of coming to a quick conclusion that puts money in their pockets is much higher.
Thus, I was rejected outright by many, many law firms. They simply told me"we don't deal with cases against the state", and that was the end of that. Many, many lawfirms also wouldn't return my calls when I would leave a description of my case with their intake receptionist. It was beyond frustrating.
I eventually did find a lawyer in the venerable Eleanor Jackson Piel (Eleanor represented Cynthia Fisher during her seminal case, Fisher v Vassar College (see the previous post for more information on that)).
Unfortunately, some months after being retained by me, Eleanor fell gravely ill and I was forced to go through the whole nasty process once again of finding a lawyer. This time I was wiser, but sad that I could not fight my lawsuit with someone like Eleanor at my side; if you ever need an attorney, may you be so blessed to find someone even remotely like Eleanor Jackson Piel. Eleanor has been a bulldog advocate for human rights for many decades, and I feel honored to know her.
The second time around searching for a lawyer, I took advantage of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER ) system. The PACER web pages are very cheap to view, and allow you to view all documents that have been filed for all federal court cases in America. To get started with PACER you need to create an account, which involves giving them a credit card number to which to bill the page charges. No need to worry about huge extraneous charges...there aren't any. I have looked at a *lot* of documents on PACER, and the total charges so far after about a year are something like $65, which is a drop in the bucket considering the wealth of information I have learned from searches using the system, and also considering how much I pay my lawyer ($350 per hour).
To find a lawyer who was knowledgeable about academic law and who had a good track record litigating against her university, I simply figured out which US federal court district I was in, then used the PACER online database to search for previous federal discrimination lawsuits against my university. The PACER system told me which lawsuits against my university were won, lost, settled, or still ongoing. The PACER system also told me the name and full contact information of all the attorneys involved in each case.
So, it is a simple process to pick the lawyers who have fought cases that have won against your university.
Also, the full details of each case (called the Plaintiff's "Complaint") are available off of PACER for pretty much every lawsuit. The Complaint details everything the Plaintiff has to say about how the university did her wrong, and it is usually the first document filed in a court case. The university's responses to each complaint (called, appropriately enough, the "Response") are also available. It will probably be very helpful to you to read all the Complaints and all the Responses for each case against your university. It will give you a pretty good idea of the tactics the university has been using to fight such cases (and leave you wiser as to how to go about possibly avoiding them as you write your own Complaint).
Note that the PACER system charges you 8 cents a page to view these documents, which I think is a very reasonable price. Be sure to copy the PDF files of the documents you view to your computer such that if you need to look at them again you won't have to pay another 8 cents per page.
Also, and this is up to you, you might consider contacting some of the Plaintiffs in ongoing lawsuits against your university. I have noticed that universities seem to take the divide and conquer route by acting like your lawsuit is the first that has ever been filed in their utopian work enviroment. The other complainants will probably be in departments other than yours, but it will really help to chat with them anyway. And you will almost certainly find that they are very grateful to find that someone gives enough of a damn about their case to actually contact them about it. Be sure to be up front with them about how you found out about their case.
A tip: if you can't find your university in PACER using one moniker, like, for instance, University of California at Berkeley, try just looking for Berkeley. I found federal lawsuits against my university listed under about four different monikers.
Another tip: if you still can't find any federal discrimination lawsuits against your university, make sure you got the district court right. Sometimes it can be confusing, particularly if there is more than one district in your state.
And a final tip: if you *still* can't find any listings of federal discrimination lawsuits against your university, pick another university in your town or nearby in your state, and find a lawyer who has successfully litigated against them.
9:49:03 AM
I promised a posting on the issue of how decide whether or not to sue if you've been discriminated against or harassed in an academic setting.
If you are reading this post, you may be a female graduate student/postdoc/professor who has been through absolute hell in your career. Maybe you have come to the point where you are just sick to death of all the sexist bullshit or harassment you are having to deal with at work, or maybe you have just been fired or laid off, and while the reason given wasn't "we don't like you because you don't have a penis", you know in your heart that is damn well why they got rid of you.
You are angry. Eaten up inside with hatred perhaps. You may feel like all your career aspirations have been raped, ravaged, and stomped into the mud. You may be crying yourself to sleep every night over it all.
And you've come to the point where you are so pissed off that you want to sue.
There are advantages to suing. If you win, you have the satisfaction that a judge and/or jury affirmed that you were wronged. That can feel pretty good. And, win or lose, you have the satisfaction of making the people who did you wrong have to explain their actions. If you win, you will get monetary compensation for at least some of your damages. Also, for some people fighting a lawsuit is a way of trying to make the world a little bit better for the people who come afterwards.
But is suing really the best choice to make in all cases? When Absinthe was mulling the decision to start the lawsuit process, what very little honest, no-bullsh*t advice Absinthe could glean from the internet appeared to indicate that the lawsuit process might take "a year or more", which seemed like a pretty big commitment to make. But, with the support of her husband and friends, Absinthe decided to take the risk and launch a complaint to the EEOC. That was over two years ago now, and the lawsuit hasn't even reached the discovery stage yet (ie; where the two sides start collecting evidence in preparation to go to trial). Obviously, "a year or more" is kind of an understatement.
So, with the wisdom of her experiences backing her up, Absinthe is here to tell you that if you are thinking of launching a lawsuit be prepared for a number of things:
Conservatively expect to spend the next five years of your life fighting the lawsuit. If you go into it expecting to spend five years in the lawsuit process, you probably won't be disappointed by how long it actually takes (but be warned...Absinthe has seen more than one academic lawsuit draw on for a lot longer than five years). Also, Absinthe hasn't done a precise statistical study on this, but it appears that academic discrimination lawsuits are somewhat more complicated and long-lived than regular employment discrimination lawsuits.
Be prepared to cough up $10,000 to $25,000 as an attorney retainer fee up front. No joke, it really costs that much to get started. And that is *just* to get started. Don't think that an attorney will feel as passionately about your case as you do and will be willing to work pro bono. It pretty much never works that way. Attorneys are there to do a job for you, and they expect to get paid (a *lot*...Absinthe currently pays her attorney $350 per hour).
As an aside here, Absinthe knows that few people, particularly graduate students and postdocs, can come up with over $10,000 in cash. Thus sadly, even if your career has been ruined, if you are very junior it is pretty likely that you will not be able to afford a lawsuit. Absinthe, for instance, is just squeaking by these days. If you are one of these junior people, and this news is coming as a blow to you, trust me that I feel very, very sorry for you.
On the subject of money, be warned that most universities (especially state universities) essentially have infinitely deep pockets for litigation. Thus they can and will deliberately drag the case on for as long as possible, because they know that the Plaintiff is hemoragging money out of her bank account and at some point may likely be forced just to drop the lawsuit.
Be prepared for the emotional toll this is going to take on your relationships with those who are closest to you. Absinthe has seen that many people get divorced during the lawsuit process because their marriage can't handle the stress. Do you really want to lose your spouse too? (assuming you are married). The lawsuit also takes it toll on your relationships with friends; after about the second year or so, they kind of get sick of hearing about the lawsuit. It really is kind of a downer to be around someone who is going through that kind of hell, no matter how much you may like them.
If you are still carrying on in your career despite the lawsuit, be prepared to have workplace friends that you've known for years suddenly shun you. And this is almost certain to happen. Most don't do it to be hurtful, they are just embarassed by the whole situation. Or, they may think you were being "uppity" by making waves by launching the lawsuit. And, believe it or not, females actually seem to be more likely than males to be that way! On the upside, you may find that some people in your workplace who you never really interacted with much before suddenly step up to be incredibly supportive.
Be prepared to have your name and professional reputation dragged through the mud. You may have been utterly competent at your job, but you will almost certainly be faced with the uphill battle of trying to prove that you were as good as all the rest of your co-workers. If you have a sexual harassment case, you may be faced with the emotional rape of having *your* sexual morals dragged through the mud (ie; you may be blamed for "asking for it"). Are you really prepared for all of that?
Be warned that perhaps only 25% or less of Plaintiffs actually see any money in the end. If you don't have some kind of smoking gun evidence that you were discriminated against or harassed, be prepared for the fact that the odds are very much against you. In fact, in an academic setting this is especially true....it is well known that in tenure-denial cases for instance, the judge is more likely to side with the university since the university people are considered to be smart and sage and presumably have better judgement on who to grant tenure to than any court could ever have (I'm not making this up....see some of the stuff written about, for instance, Fisher v Vassar College , and here ).
By the way, Cynthia Fisher, if you ever read this...thank you, thank you, THANK YOU. Absinthe stands in awe of you. Cynthia, Absinthe's first lawyer was Eleanor Jackson Piel (before Eleanor fell ill) and in Eleanor's office Absinthe witnessed the huge filing cabinets (note the plural) associated with all the documents of your case. You are owed a standing ovation by all the women who have come after you Cynthia. I hope that wherever you are now you have found peace with the whole friggin' mess. You are an inspiration and a hero to me.
Back to the tips...
Be prepared for the fact that simply launching the lawsuit will forever after brand you as a litigation risk, and will almost certainly hamper your future job hunting attempts. This is particularly true if your case generates any kind of media attention (as, for instance, Absinthe's has). Absinthe expects that even her newly developing career as a statistician will be haunted by the spectre of her lawsuit. But that's the way it goes.
Are your expectations for what is to come out of the lawsuit realistic? Are you expecting an apology? Trust me, even if you win, you won't get one. Are you expecting to get your career back, if you were fired? Trust me, that is unlikely to happen. Are you expecting to be awarded millions of dollars? Sometimes that happens, but those cases are pretty much always appealed (drawing the lawsuit on for several more years), and the judgement is pretty much always reduced on appeal. Actually, what often happens in such cases is that, just in order to get the damn money before they are 80 years old, a prevailing Plaintiff who just got awarded a judgement of millions will strike a deal with the Defendants for a significantly lower sum paid out immediately if the Defendants agree not to appeal.
So, those are just some of the things to expect in the lawsuit process. For many people, the best choice may in fact be just to find some way to get around the problem without going the lawsuit route. For instance, if possible, just get another job, or get another supervisor. Or just quit the field altogether. This last one may not seem like an option, but please consider it (up until perhaps 18 months ago Absinthe herself could not see herself as anything but a physicist...it was a key part of her self identity, and in some ways it still is). Above all, get some counselling to help you through the stress of the situation.
If you decide not to go the lawsuit route, there is almost certainly no perfect solution to your workplace problem (in fact the lawsuit route isn't a perfect solution either). The trick is to sit down and have a good think and try to figure out what you *really* want out of life in the next five to ten years, and how best you can get there without suffering too much emotional damage along the way.
And, if you do ultimately decide to go the lawsuit route, I hope you find this blog useful ;-)
4:03:25 AM
Absinthe noted in a recent post that females with kids rarely make it to the faculty level in physics. For the mostly childless women who do make it to the tenured faculty level, Absinthe has come to suspect that a not-insignificant fraction of them got there because the males on their faculty hiring committee considered them a decorative-yet-functional additon to their department.
Don't misunderstand Absinthe; she thinks that all of these women are extremely gifted physicists. They had to be in order to scrabble their way up to the top. Absinthe suspects however that many highly gifted women, childless or not, have never made it to the faculty level in physics simply because they are not preternaturally good looking.
Why does Absinthe think this? Is it jealousy because Absinthe herself looks pretty much like a 39-year-old-mother-of-two-with-a-knitting-habit would be expected to look like?
No, it is not. Absinthe is not vain, and Absinthe is rarely jealous.
The reason Absinthe thinks that many physics faculty hiring committees (which are totally male dominated) demand that female candidates be both brilliant and beautiful is because Absinthe has spent the last year doing a study of the hiring patterns of the top 50 physics research departments, as ranked by the NSF. Maybe in a later post I'll talk more about that study, but for now, suffice to say that doing the study involved carefully reading through the web pages of each of those departments. And nearly all the departments post pictures of their faculty.
It struck Absinthe about half-way through the study that, jeez leweez, many of the women physics professors are totally drop-dead-gorgeous. I mean *way* better looking than average, and certainly a hell of a lot better looking than pretty much all the males in the departments in question.
Absinthe originally thought of putting links to some examples of such women in this post, but it is going too far to suggest that any particular woman got tenure simply because she looks like a super model. Absinthe merely thinks that the websites of the top 50 universities present compelling evidence that on average really good looking women appear to have a much better chance of landing a faculty job in physics than a regular looking woman. And the websites of the top 50 universities present compelling evidence that what a guy looks like really has nothing to do with his chances of landing a physics faculty job.
Absinthe has never noticed this talked about anywhere. In fact, Absinthe doesn't even know if anyone else has even noticed it. Some may think that it is terribly gauche for Absinthe to point out this phenomenon, but Absinthe doesn't give a rip. Absinthe has two daughters, and she would like to think that telling it like it is will perhaps help to result in a world where her daughters' future career success won't depend on how good looking they are.
It would be interesting if a sociologist or psychologist were to make a photo lineup of all the faculty members at these universities and ask volunteers to rank how good looking they think each person is (without telling them that the people are physicists). Then correct for age, and see what kind of result comes out for the average of males vs females. Absinthe knows already what the result will be.
The point of this posting is that there are so many barriers to women's success in physics that aren't mentioned when the mucky-mucks get together to discuss the lack of women in physics. Absinthe sees very clearly what many of the important barriers are, but also sees that some are never discussed because of "PC" taboos. Physics departments where the only women faculty are childless and awesomely brilliant and ethereally beautiful don't exactly paint realistic role models for female undergraduates or graduate students.
1:44:41 AM
