There Ain’t No Women Attorneys
I finally found a large law firm that calls women attorneys what they really are — female attorneys. Check out the Preston Gates & Ellis Commitment to Diversity statement.
Most large firms refer to their female attorneys as women attorneys. Women is a noun, not an adjective (like female), so it can’t be used to modify another noun, like attorneys.
Why do most large firms call female attorneys women attorneys? I asked the marketing guru for a large firm about this and he told me that women is a stronger term than female and that’s why law firms keep calling female attorneys women attorneys.
I guess I just don’t get it. While marketing copy often makes good and effective use of the grammatically incorrect, breaking the rules has to be done with care. This is especially true when it comes to law firms that (say they) place such a high priority on writing skills.
You can’t get a better read on what passes for good writing at a firm than the firm’s Web site. Why? Because it is now the face of the firm!
June 20th, 2006 at 16:59
THANK YOU!!! “Women attorneys” is one of my pet peeves! Not only is it ungrammatical, to me it carries a dismissive tone. Much along the lines someone might sniff at “women drivers,” it seems to create a differential category for female attorneys. By using the noun as an adjective, it suggests there is something *beyond sex* that is different about female attorneys. The marketing guru is unwittingly correct — “women” is a much stronger term, and that’s why it’s damaging. I never refer to myself as a “woman attorney.” I am simply an attorney, and my sex is female, not that the one has *anything* to do with the other.
June 20th, 2006 at 19:19
Well . . . language sure does change. Years ago, gay was an adjective that meant one thing; now it means something completely different. Popular usage made it so.
Who knows? Perhaps some years from now, woman will be like female: both an adjective and a noun. Why don’t I see the same thing happening to man? Why don’t law firms refer to their men attorneys?
I’m surprised to see nearly every large law firm using a noun to modify a noun, and then giving this mistake such prominence. Given the emphasis that law firms place on the writing skills of their attorneys . . . .
I guess the managing partners and the chief marketing officers of some firms don’t much care about the quality of their super-duper electronic business cards. Wait! I take that back; I don’t guess; I know some of them don’t care. I know, from personal experience, that you can bring obvious, glaring errors to the attention of certain MPs or CMOs, and the errors just sit there and continue to glare. No one tends to them, which tells me that some firms are just flat-out wrong when they claim they take great care in everything they do. Their Web sites make it so obvious that they don’t.
I hear you loud and clear on the error of calling female attorneys women attorneys while calling male attorneys attorneys. (Ever hear a firm talk refer to a man attorney?) When a firm claims that it treats all its attorneys with dignity and respect, but then feels it has to identify the race or ethnicity or sex or sexual preference of certain types of attorneys, but it wouldn’t dare mention those of others . . . well, that’s a pet peeve of mine.