The Careerist, Harvard Law’s Lonely Women, by Vivia Chen:

Call me naive, but I was genuinely shocked that this big, prestigious bastion of liberalism [Harvard Law School] didn’t have a tenured woman of Asian descent until this year [when it tenured Jeannie Suk (pictured left)]. …The much smaller Yale Law School, which has 60 full-time faculty members to Harvard’s 100, has Amy Chua. Even more astounding, Harvard didn’t have a tenured woman of color on its law faculty until 1998, when [Lani] Guinier [(pictured center)] moved over from Penn. And Guinier held that fort all by herself until last year, when Annette Gordon Reed (pictured right) accepted a tenure position at Harvard.

Who cares about who gets tenure at some ivory tower? Well, I think it points to a systemic problem with diversity that plagues the whole profession. If minorities–particularly women of color–don’t have status at one of the leading law schools in the nation, should anyone be surprised that they’re not rising to the top when they enter practice? From the get-go, there’s a dearth of role models for women of color. …

[W]hat do Guinier and Suk make of all this? Guinier would only say that she’s “delighted” that Suk, a former student (“one of the most gifted students I’ve worked with”), is joining her tiny club. Suk, for her part, discounts that race or sex played any role in Harvard’s snail-pace approach to promoting women of color. “I can’t say that I felt discrimination,” she says, adding somewhat cryptically, “There are complex choices, and subtle signals about what you should do.”