Women Lawyers--Back on Track

Are "family friendly" awards meaningless?

So, recently, the Yale Law Women released its list of "Top Ten Family-Friendly Law Firms."  As explained by the Am-Law Daily, the methodology used to determine the "best" firms as as follows:

After sending 100 top firms a 35-question survey, the group weighted and ranked their responses. Firms garnered kudos and special attention for extending parent-leave programs, offering on-site child care, allowing lawyers to work from home, or fostering leadership opportunities for women and minorities.

Shortly after the list was announced, there was a (predictable) slew of press releases from the "winning" firms trumpeting their successful inclusion amongst the ranks of the "family-friendly."

Sounds like a great exercise, doesn't it?  But in fact, it's essentially worthless, as are most lists and awards of this type, regularly created by bar associations and other legal associations across the country.

The fact is, based upon my experience and the experiences of others that I've spoken to, it's like pulling teeth to get most law firms to participate in surveys of this type absent not-so-subtle pressure from the few women that actually have power--ie. appellate court judges and/or the few equity women partners in law firms willing to stick their neck out. 

And, nominations from women working in "family-friendly" firms are even harder to come by.  In general, most women perceive their legal employers to be the antithesis of "family-friendly."

And, the methodology used to determine "family-friendly" is necessarily vague and the results of these lists are accordingly worth no more than the paper that they're written on.

In fact, I've spoken to many women working for firms that have made lists of this type in the past who express their utter amazement that their firm was even in the running, let alone made the list.

As best I can tell, the only benefit that comes of these lists is the PR garnered by the firms that made the cut.  Following a barrage of press releases and award acceptance speeches at various events, they milk the award for all it's for the next year by including it as a flashing badge of honor on their web site. 

As a result, unsuspecting new hires sign up thinking that they've hit the jackpot, when in fact, they've eventually learn that they've discovered hell on earth.

While I don't doubt the genuineness of those who create lists of this type, true change will come not from meaningless awards of this nature, but rather, will come from the exodus of disgusted associates from BigLaw.

Believe me.  It will happen-it's happening already.  And when it does, BigLaw won't know what hit it.

Toe Cleavage: Offensive to the Legal Profession?

Apparently, a group of lawyers in Memphis recently spent a lot of time mulling over just such weighty issues as toe cleavage.  According to this Memphis Daily News article, a bunch of Memphis lawyers and judges met to discuss the issue of a dress code for local lawyers. 

The meeting included "an impromptu modeling of shoes to determine if either pair represented “cocktail shoes,” and if they did, whether they were inappropriate or disrespectful to the courts."

Some attendees were particularly "offended by too-short skirts, too much cleavage or too much arm being shown, and running shoes being worn in the courthouse."

At issue was a dress code proposed by a number of Memphis Bar Assocations.

The proposed rule at issue reads as follows:

“All attorneys should wear appropriate attire. Men shall wear coats, ties, slacks and appropriate footwear, which does not include athletic shoes or shoes without socks. Women shall wear professional and conservative attire, such as dresses with jackets, suits or pantsuits (with appropriate tops), and appropriate footwear, which does not include cocktail shoes or sandals or athletic shoes."

I think my favorite part of the rule is that the attire for women is specifically described as "conservative."  For some reason, men need not dress "conservatively".  Presumably 1970's style leisure suits would be perfectly appropriate for men to wear court.

And, one wonders how cold-weather-climate attorneys like myself are expected to handle the issue of boots in the winter.  Boot are most certainly not "appropriate footwear" under the proposed rule.  However, they are an absolute necessity when you have to walk a few blocks to court in the middle of an Upstate NY winter. 

When I was an Assistant Public Defender, I would drag my 60 files behind me in a box on a luggage trolley through sidewalks covered with snow, wearing boots and carrying a bag with my heels inside of it.  I'd then change my footwear prior to court, but was lucky enough to have a place to store it, since I was essentially a fixture in the courtroom

Things were more difficult once I began working at a law firm.  I attended court only occasionally, and would have to change my shoes before entering the courtroom.  I always had a difficult time figuring out where to leave my boots, since there was no place set aside for that purpose.  Sometimes I'd just carry them inside the courtroom and leave them, wet and covered with salt from the streets, at my seat.

Men had the luxury of slipping "rubbers" over their (flat) shoes.  Many of them wore the unattractive foot coverings into court as well, and I never heard any complaints about that particular practice.

Meanwhile, the ABA Journal blog recently discussed the issue of dress codes for lawyers as well, and referenced this Wall Street Journal article:  Bare-Legged Ladies: Hosiery Reveals Office Divide.

I think that most women would agree that, in general, nylons are ridiculously uncomfortable.  And,  Nylons in 90 degree, humid weather are downright torture.   Lined pantsuits in the summer are even worse.  The only bearable option is a skirt without nylons.

Nylons are simply not an option in the summer.  Period. 

So, I would respectfully suggest, my fellow lawyers, that you take your dress code and implement it in a jurisdiction where the sun don't shine (and the snow don't fall). 

 

We Needed a Study to Figure This Out?

I was honestly amazed to read this article summarizing a study that concluded that "female lawyers more likely to practice in firms, less likely to make partner."  It wasn't the results of the study that surprised me--it was that the study was conducted in the first instance.

Apparently, a University of Iowa sociologist "analyzed data collected from two groups of Michigan Law School graduates -- the classes of 1972-78 and 1979-85 -- who completed surveys one, five and 15 years after graduation."

After conducting extensive analysis, she concluded that:

The legal profession's efforts to promote diversity are working to get women lawyers in the law firm door, but once they're in, they remain less likely to be promoted to partner...

The study...found that women who practiced in a firm for five or more years were 13 percent less likely than men to make partner, even if their qualifications were equal and regardless of whether they had children.

I could have told you that without conducting a study.

The article did have some interesting observations about the reasons for the disparity, even though the results of the study seemed fairly obvious.  From the end of the article:

"Older men tend to feel less comfortable spending time with a young woman than with a young man. With the guys, it's more of a father-son bond -- let's play some golf, let's hit happy hour, and I'll give you some advice about your career and see what I can do to help you," she said. "Men might shy away from that type of mentoring relationship with a young woman because they're afraid of what people will think."

And, Noonan notes, the selection process for partnership isn't necessarily objective. Even if a woman does well in her work, colleagues with the clout to name partners may still have difficulty picturing her in a position of power.

Are successful women avoiding motherhood?

So asks this article from a San Francisco ABC affiliate.  It's an interesting article, but the title is poorly worded in my opinion.  The article implies that the only way to be "successful" is to have a full-time career.

I completely disagree with that.  Success is in the eye of the beholder, as far as I'm concerned.  There is not one way to define success, and balancing a part-time schedule for a portion of one's career with family and achieving happiness is certainly a form of success.

That being said, it's an interesting, although somewhat depressing article.  I'm looking forward to the day when the statistics quoted in the article tend to be more favorable toward women with careers and families.

From the article:

A new study from Washington & Lee University shows professional women are walking away from motherhood and marriage -- more than the general population.

Law professor Robin Wilson's research makes up a chapter in a new book called "Rethinking Business Management."

She says, while four-fifths of senior male lawyers have children, only two-thirds of senior women do, and there is a similar break from marriage.

She looked at more than 100,000 people with at least a college degree, and found that women lawyers, doctors and MBA's are opting out of marriage at a higher rate than their male counterparts. When they do marry, women professionals have a harder time making it last...

"Professional men are much more likely to be married to homemakers or women who don't have the financial withdrawal to leave, even if they want or need to," says Williams.

Wilson's research show that among women with a law degree, just shy of 6 percent have a stay-at-home spouse, versus nearly 40 percent of male lawyers. For MBA's, nearly 10 percent of women have a spouse at home, compared with 44 percent of men. For MD's it's just over 12 percent for women versus 48 percent for male MD's.

As for having families, we asked Williams, what was wrong with careers where you can't have children.

"There aren't careers where you can't have children. There are careers where women can't have children. So the question is, are we going to design careers so that only men can have them if they want a conventional family life? Or are we going to design careers so that either men or women can have them if they want a conventional family life?"...

Williams says Gen-X and Gen-X men show signs of being different than their baby-boomer dads. The WorkLife Center hotline is frequently hearing from young men about issues like paternity leave.

Women Really Want A Level Playing Field

There's a great article over at the Complete Lawyer written by Cathy S. Wright:  Women Really Want A Level Playing Field.  I highly recommend that you give it a good read.

In this article she discusses the differences in the ways that men and women interact and perceive each other.  In my experience, many of her observations are right on point.  The sub-titles of the article should give you a good idea of what to expect:

• While Our Goals May Be The Same, Our Strategies For Solutions Vary In Business
• Women Often Still Feel Like Outsiders
• Men And Women Are Divided By Language
• Men And Women Are Motivated Differently
• Reciprocity Means Different Things To Men And Women
• Men And Women Bear Different Life Responsibilities

My favorite part of the article is the concluding paragraphs, where she responds to the (maddening, in my opinion) claim by some that working women have a made a "choice" and have to live up to the ramifications.  I agree 100% with her take on this issue:

Some men (and more than a few women) respond that these issues are the result of life choices. Families with an at-home partner add that they are making the financial sacrifice to have someone manage the home front, so they feel working women have no right to have their life choices subsidized by business.

I don’t think this is an either/or proposition; one reality doesn’t cancel the other. Rather, we need to acknowledge that the structure of our society forces women lawyers to assume burdens and make choices that most of their male counterparts don’t share. Women-owned business is the fastest growing segment of the US economy, and as hard as it is to start a business, these businesses are succeeding equally with businesses started by men. Many observers believe that this trend reflects the impulsion of women to set up organizations that respect the realities of their lives. These new businesses require women to work hard, maybe even harder, than they do in the corporate world, and yet they succeed. Freed of the necessity to accommodate to structures that sometimes feel unfriendly, women are finding ways to be successful. The lesson here is that women aren’t failing to accommodate to the corporate world anymore than the corporate world is failing to accommodate women. Clearly there are ways that work for women to work. 

Both genders can take steps to ameliorate the current situation. We all need to become aware of how our unconscious differences create misunderstandings. Recognizing that this is a team issue rather than a “women’s issue” is another essential component to leveraging a law firm’s investment in talented women employees. And while women lawyers need to take the responsibility for understanding the ground rules in the arena they have chosen, men need to develop a sense of appreciation, and perhaps some humility, about the home court advantages they may take for granted.

Women Lawyers Bill More/Less Than Men--Depending On How You Spin It

Over at Legal Blog Watch, Carolyn Elefant posted about very interesting British study with intriguing--and somewhat controversial--findings: that childless women lawyers are the most "productive" workers, while women lawyers with young children are the least "productive".  And, fathers were more "productive" than their childless male counterparts.

As Carolyn aptly noted, the way that "productivity" was measured--the amount of hours billed--was a questionable methodology, since:

(A)s we all know, hours billed don't necessarily correlate to efficiency; indeed, longer hours may signal less productivity, not more.

Another interesting point from the summary of the study:

Further analysis showed that female lawyers with children usually had to juggle professional and domestic responsibilities because they tended to be married to a partner who also worked. On the other hand, male lawyers with children were likely to have a partner who did not work, and who was therefore able to take responsibility for domestic duties.

Wallace and Young said another unexpected finding was that family-friendly organisational work practices had a negative effect on the productivity of male staff but not female staff. Moreover, the sexes used the benefit of flexible hours differently - professional fathers spent the time pursuing leisure activities, whereas for professional mothers this time was spent largely on domestic duties. It seems the old adage 'a woman's work is never done' still rings true in the twenty-first century.

Mark Cohen at the Minnesota Lawyer Blog had this to say about the discrepancies in the "productivity" of lawyer dads vs. lawyer moms: 

One wonders if this "productivity" isn't a means of dodging out on domestic chores. Billing an additional hour may not look so bad when the alternative is to go home and change a diaper ...

He raises a great point that brought to mind something that occurred early on my legal career.  A male lawyer with kids and a stay-at-home wife was one of the only lawyers to make it into the office during one of the worst snowstorms that we'd ever had in Upstate NY and made a telling comment that I'll get to in a moment. 

But first, the storm.  I grew up here and was used to driving in snow, snow and more snow, and for the first time in my life, after nearly sliding off the road three times and passing 6 ditched cars, I had to turn my car around and head home after driving only 1/2 mile.  It was the only time that I've ever found myself unable to navigate safely in the snow.

I eventually made it into the office around 10 a.m. and there were only 4 (out of 20) lawyers there.  This particular lawyer was one of them and he told me that he'd been the first to arrive at 8 a.m.  I asked him how he even made it in, and he replied, "Are you kidding?!? The alternative was being stuck in the house with my wife and three kids on a snow day.  Hell.on.earth."

I've never forgotten that comment. 

And, after hearing it, I noticed that the male lawyers with kids were always the first into the office--and upon arrival, sat around in their offices drinking coffee, feet on the desk, reading the newspaper for the first 45 minutes or so.  One wonders what justification was offered to  their stay-at-home wives as they "rushed" out the door before the kids awoke.

But, alas, I digress.

More on this study can be found at the following blogs (and of course, the comments following some of posts are full the seemingly obligatory tidbits about women lawyers taking up the space of a more worthwhile and more qualified guy):

• Bag and Baggage
• Wall Street Journal Law Blog
• Above the Law

The Progress of Women Lawyers at Big Firms: Steadied or Simply Studied?

From Ms. JD I learned of the following Fordham Law School Law Review article:  The Progress of Women Lawyers at Big Firms: Steadied or Simply Studied?  The conclusions were predictable and, for the most part, depressing. 

Women lawyers earn less than men. 

Women lawyers still represent substantially less than half of those at the top of the legal hierarchy, although the numbers have improved ever so slightly since 1988, the year that I graduated from high school and naively believed that the world was my oyster despite the fact that,  through no fault of my own, I possessed a uterus.

Oh, the silly fallacies of youth.

From the article:

I turn first to private practice, the setting where many lawyers choose to begin their careers.  Back in 1988, law schools were near the end of a twenty-year trajectory that saw women’s enrollment increase by an astounding 850%.6  This escalation promised rapid progress toward gender parity within the profession as a whole, presumably with large firms at the helm, as this newly populous generation of women lawyers rose through the ranks.

This was not to be the case.  Whatever the precise percentages, statistics for the past ten to fifteen years show that the nation’s law schools produce a relatively equal number of qualified male and female attorneys and that, though firms generally hire women associates in numbers correlative to the talent pool,7 women do not reach partnership at the same rate as men...

What has changed?  For one, “women’s issues” as defined in the 1980s are now increasingly gender neutral.  For another, firms are responding to increased pressure to show results in their diversity efforts, at the risk of diminished status within rankings and other external measures of firm standing and prestige—and at the risk of losing fresh talent and even clients.

What has not changed?  Three issues that were the focus of much criticism twenty years ago regrettably still linger:  the persistence of gender stereotypes, the resistance to flexible work arrangements, and the use of the billable hours economic model.  Given the breathtaking scientific, technological, and cultural advances of the past twenty years, does it not seem that greater progress should have been made?...

The 1988 ABA Commission on Women in the Profession report identified “subtle barriers” to advancement of women in the profession.70  Women perceived that they had to “work harder, do better and make fewer mistakes” to achieve the same degree of respect as men, and were “treated with a presumption of incompetence” that they had to overcome whereas men were treated with a presumption of competence “overcome only after numerous significant mistakes.”71  Men, the report found, “perceive fewer problems of discrimination, and . . . are more likely to regard the issues that greatly disturb women in the profession as silly or trivial"...

(W)hile my focus remains on women—and hopefully the substantial number of senior women lawyers in firms today can be especially helpful in preparing newer lawyers for the bumps in the road—in truth these issues increasingly have become genderless life issues, offering a special incentive for men as well as women to seek out solutions. 

Productive legal careers these days may go on for four or more decades.  Surely ways can be found to navigate a particularly challenging period that typically falls at the mid- associate level, enabling women to later enjoy their families as well as leadership in their firms, in the profession, on the bench, and in public life.

(emphasis added).

True dat.

 

Judge reprimanded for racial remarks

I'd call 'em sexist as well.  It's a two-fer.  From the Yahoo article, Judge reprimanded for racial remarks:

A county judge was reprimanded for calling three black female lawyers "the Supremes" in court and advising the defendant to get "an experienced male attorney."

Washington County Circuit Judge W. Kennedy Boone has acknowledged that his comments suggested racial and sexual bias. In his written response to a complaint, Boone said he was trying to protect the three public defenders from representing a difficult defendant.