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Okay—still officially Away, but the Bay Street #lawtwitter gender pay gap discussion has been so frustrating to observe and it's become more distracting to *not* say anything. Just spilt 500 words about this into Evernote, out of sheer internal pressure, so may as well (1/x) 
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Many excellent points made already. What has further been driving me up a wall is the “So imagine what happens with less privileged women??” We don’t have to imagine!! WE ALREADY KNOW. We don’t need the object lesson. Those women aren’t hypotheticals; they LIVE IT—have all along.
So where is the profession-wide exhortation to support and dismantle systems for *them*? If anything, we are being asked to line up behind lawyers helping those who uphold interlocking webs of systemic oppression in the first place (b/c whc clients can even afford Bay Street).
This includes white collar crime and activities that are not criminalized ONLY b/c they are not-crimes disproportionately committed with impunity by the white and the rich, e.g., tax avoidance, wage theft, fine-alone offences, "regulatory gaming". HT: https://twitter.com/djmckenna00/status/1269218616861437952
To criticize ppl for “opposing gender pay equity" is to miss the point, in some cases almost wilfully. Nobody is arguing that female lawyers should not be paid equally to male counterparts—regardless of what interests & causes they are being paid to protect at the end of the day.
Casting intersectional critique, and calls for broader contextualization & systemic analysis, as itself sexist (let alone misogynistic) is classic white +capitalist feminism that involves the abandonment or erasure of women outside of a very small circle. https://twitter.com/kwetoday/status/1358961406721232897
Convo is difficult/messy b/c critiques are not @ female Bay Street lawyers for wanting equality, but @ *selective /outsized attentiveness* awarded to them & universalized by the “establishment” legal profession (and also by some of those lawyers). More: https://twitter.com/SamPetersTO/status/1358963138322984960
It’s hard b/c the most responsive solution wd be for everyone who is uniquely up in arms re the Bay Street gender pay gap to go back in time & show up w/ the SAME ENERGY for the even greater systemic financial & sociopolitical inequity visited upon BIPOC & BIWOC lawyers, [cont.d]
...Indigenous rights lawyers; racial, LGBTQ+, disability justice lawyers; Legal Aid lawyers; environmental lawyers; human rights /civil liberties lawyers (those doing it exclusively or all along), etc. Good distinction here: https://twitter.com/yavar_hameed/status/1359306551010488320
LET ALONE for, I dare say (or Lex dare said), women & other marginalized individuals who are not even lawyers! (/s): https://twitter.com/lex_is/status/1359208581921468416 (whc I could also do better; & this isn't @ those who do show up & consistently leverage their own power & privilege twds systemic change)
Travelling back in time to do that is, of course, not possible (yet...). So next best thing: to those who haven't been already, please do that going forward. Also, +10 to this: https://twitter.com/arash_ghiassi/status/1359227253377351688
Conflating critique of the problem w/ critique of narrow selective attentiveness to the problem happens a lot. But discussion only comes up when “inequality among the privileged” is already centre of attention, by defn (since everyone else is neglected), so derailing is built-in.
We must think bigger: https://twitter.com/kwetoday/status/1359238669622771720 This ties into my pet peeve re confidence gap: women & BIPOC shdn't hv to be over-confident & also receive misattributed credit/praise; white men shd be *less* confident & *not* receive those. Equalize yes, but THE DIRECTION MATTERS.
Or, in better words by @debbierachlis: "Just like trickle down economics, trickle down feminism is bullshit. [...] Representation in systems that require inequality to exist is not justice." From this thread: https://twitter.com/debbierachlis/status/1359200780759236614
Addendum: I'd be remiss not to acknowledge that many go into big law precisely b/c they lack/ed class privilege and had to take on massive student loans, etc., so faced constrained choices (while noting others in similar positions still choose otherwise). https://twitter.com/kenyajade/status/1359187849007034368
I also have a slightly complicated relationship to all of this due to having grown up w/ class privilege, whc doesn't go away even if I chose (and indeed, it enabled the choice of) a legal field /career path systemically marginalized w/i the profession (whole other thread there).
But I think those postscripts support the point that the big law pay gap is 1 symptom of many & underlying root causes of injustice aren't severable. If systemic inequality is turtles all the way down, this issue barely scratches the first shell. (No 
s harmed in this tweet) x/x
s harmed in this tweet) x/x
{Fades back into offline ether} https://twitter.com/Cyn_K/status/1340388915316977664
