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- Title
"We Don't Hire a Woman Here": Claire L'Heureux-Dubé and the Career Prospects for Early Female Law Graduates from Laval University.
- Authors
Backhouse, Constance
- Abstract
Claire L'Heureux-Dubé, a bold and renowned member of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1987 to 2002, was among the first twenty women to graduate from Laval University's Faculty of Law. As a detour from the larger project of writing Claire's biography, the author offers insights into the events in Claire's life that led her to a successful career in private practice, which at that time was virtually the only route to a judicial appointment. Perhaps the most pivotal of those events was the fact that when she was admitted to the bar, Sam Schwarz Bard, the private practitioner for whom she had been working as a secretary, had the breadth of vision to immediately take her on as a lawyer and to mentor her through the early years of her career. The author compares Claire's path with the more meandering career paths of most of the other early Laval female law graduates, and unpacks the daunting challenges they faced in establishing and pursuing a career in law. Among those challenges were open gender bias, unwelcoming male colleagues, marriage, self-limiting expectations and a lack of information about career opportunities. By way of contrast, the author looks at the strikingly more direct career trajectories of some of their male classmates.
- Subjects
CANADA; L'HEUREUX-Dube, Claire, 1927-; WOMEN lawyers; UNIVERSITE Laval; LAW school graduates; SEX discrimination in employment; GENDER inequality -- Social aspects; CAREER development -- Social aspects
- Publication
Queen's Law Journal, 2014, Vol 39, Issue 2, p355
- ISSN
0316-778X
- Publication type
Article