Academic

Clerkship interviews and women's attire

By Tung Yin

I have to admit, this is not exactly a topic that I expected to be blogging about, but it did come up in a recent clerkship interview workshop for students and prompted a further serious discussion with a couple of my fellow junior colleagues . . . .

The issue is, what advice would you give a female clerkship applicant as to whether she should feel comfortable wearing a pants suit -- as opposed to a skirt suit -- for a clerkship interview.  And second, would you give that advice unprompted?

The concern is that there might be some judges who have an unwritten dress code for female lawyers and that failure to conform to that dress code might marginally harm an applicant's chance for the clerkship.  On the flip side is the concern that even giving such advice will necessarily perpetuate that unwritten dress code itself.

My own view was that it probably wouldn't make a difference in the vast majority of instances, but it might make a marginal difference in a few cases (0 < N < 5%, would be my estimate).  So my suggestion was that the student wear the pants suit if she preferred it, but to be aware that there's a small risk involved.

All of which, to be clear, is not a normative statement of how I think women should dress for interviews, but rather, just a predictive statement.  But I'm curious whether any readers think that N ~ 0 for all intents and purposes.  (By the way, in case you are wondering, the two colleagues I was having this discussion with are both women, and I was more or less in the middle in terms of suggested advice.  We were pretty much in agreement on the general principle, only differing somewhat on our estimate of N.)

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on September 10, 2007 (boomark / email).