Just not *that* woman

Currently, eighteen (18) people have thrown their hats in the ring to run against Trump in 2020. Eighteen. It's sometimes hard to remember just how crowded the field is when the media really only wants to talk about about a few of these candidates: Joe Biden, Beto O'Rourke, Bernie Sanders, and now, Pete Buttigieg. These four men entered the race at different times, yet each has received a similar flood of attention. Biden and Bernie are familiar faces and were among those who people wanted to see run. Beto and Buttigieg are exciting political up-and-comers, who promise to breathe fresh air into Washington. And, of course, they are all white males. By itself, that fact isn't all that surprising. Most politicians are white males. Like the law, the field of politics has been and is still dominated by them. We made progress on that front in 2018, when a record number of women were elected to Congress. However, the top jobs - that of president and vice president - have remained staunchly male, and, at least in this initial coverage, it looks like that will not be changing this cycle.

Hillary Clinton tried her best to change that, and very nearly did. Hillary has always inspired me, and she inspired many of the men and women I was closest to in 2016. Despite that, her campaign was excruciating and frustrating to watch every step of the way due to the sexism of the media, and the general electorate. Apparently, Hillary just isn't likable. She alienates people. She's a war hawk. Her pantsuits. Her emails. And then there was the most irritating line from those who claimed they weren't voting for her: "I'll vote for a woman, just not that woman." The people who were saying that particular line weren't Republicans, who likely weren't trying to vote for a woman, but rather other liberal and independent men and women.

One of the women most cited as one whom the aforementioned group would vote for was Elizabeth Warren. Warren officially entered the 2020 race in January of this year. Despite a good deal of excitement surrounding her announcement, the focus on her has died down in favor of the four men mentioned at the beginning of this blog. Nonetheless, Warren has continued to campaign and release detailed policy plans - my favorite of which has been been her ambitious plan for universal child care. Not only is it a good plan, but it is also one that likely would only be thought of by a woman. Yet, one of the more recent Quinnipiac polls as her well behind Biden, Bernie, and Beto, and tied at 4% with Buttigieg, who entered the race well after she did. Some chalk this up to that whole DNA testing thing. As a person of color, that put me off a little bit too. But, not only did her childcare plan win me over, but I also took care to check any vestiges of internalized misogyny and remember that people, men and women, are imperfect and make mistakes. It isn't fair to dismiss a candidate due to a single judgement error, because everyone makes them.

It has been tough for other female candidates, too. Kamala Harris is polling better than Warren, but still no where near frontrunners Biden and Bernie. Like Warren, Harris' entry into the race was met with excitement. She is a strong woman of color, with a progressive record in Congress. Her background as a prosecutor was no secret, but people dug in anyway, and then came the criticism - as a baby prosecutor she was not progressive enough. I've worked at a public defender's office, I get the general distrust of prosecutors. But, Harris' record here needs to be looked at through an intersectional lens. As a woman of color, she wouldn't have had the power, at the beginning of her career, to have the kind of record and make the kinds of changes progressives want from her. The law is dominated by white males in almost all fields, offices of district attorneys not excluded. As much as Harris likely wanted to keep the needs of her community in mind as a prosecutor, she also needed to ensure that she had a good reputation with her white male bosses. This likely meant she couldn't appear to "go easy" on anyone.

But, in politics and other high-powered positions, women are not allowed to make mistakes or have questionable past opinions or records. The poll referenced above has Joe Biden leading the field with a whopping 29% of people polled. Biden, as much as people loved him as President Obama's Vice President, is not a perfect candidate by any means. One of his biggest flaws is his treatment of women, which has come to light in the past few weeks. Biden's boundary issues with women are well documented in pictures. His actions suggest a pattern rather than an isolated incident. However, he is still in the lead for the nomination, whereas Warren's one mistake may be tanking her chances. The same poll puts Bernie in second place with 19% of the vote, though much ado has been made about his lead in terms of fundraising. But Bernie is not perfect either. He has been dismissive of the concerns of people of color and some of his more rapid supporters are crazy, and he didn't do enough to calm them down. I could run a similar analysis on Beto and Buttigieg, who also have flawed records and are similarly not perfect candidates. People are still more excited about them than Warren or Harris - or at least that is what a quick glance at The New York Times or Twitter would have you believe.

I was hoping that after Trump's election, the double-standard in politics - expecting near perfection from female candidates while forgiving males - would lessen enough to give women a fighting chance at the presidency. It's not like people didn't notice the disparate treatment Hillary received in 2016. We seem to be falling into the same trap again, though. On the progressive side of the aisle, most are just concerned with ensuring that Trump is voted out of office. This is a goal I fully support, and thus I will vote for whoever the democratic candidate ends up being, which may mean voting for another white male. However, we as a society, must do a better job of policing ourselves when it comes to evaluating female candidates in particular. There will never be a perfect candidate - male or female - so evening the playing field necessarily means that we stop holding women to a higher standard. How do we do that? We can start by being truly honest with ourselves about whether we would dismiss our favorite male candidate for the same reason we want to dismiss a female one. If we start making excuses about why it wouldn't take away from the appeal of a man, it's time to start contemplating if internalized sexism is at play.

"Dear Mr. Foland": Addressing male domination of the legal profession

Dear Mr. Foland,
We are in receipt of your application materials ... Thank you for your interest in our office.

The above is an excerpt from an email I received the other day after sending in my application materials for a fall externship. It represents the typical response I get from potential employers; it is polite, informative, and most importantly, the respondent presumes that I am a man.

When I apply for jobs, a majority of the responses I get address a Mr. Taylor Foland. As someone with a gender neutral name, I obviously understand why this happens. Taylors come in all shapes, sizes, and genders, and my application materials do not include any gender indicators such as Mr., Ms., or preferred pronouns. But, before I came to law school, this didn't happen at all...not even once. And, it happens often. About 70-80% of the responses I get address Mr. Foland. So, what is it about the legal profession that makes my resume read male?

First of all, let's talk about my resume. I've spent a lot of time crafting my resume over the years, but for the majority of law school my resume has included one or more of the following positions: museum educator at two different history museums, law clerk at the Children's Law Centre, and Law Clerk at the Sacramento City Attorney's Office. In addition to my professional obligations I also list: President of Law Students for Reproductive Justice, Co-Chair of the Women's Law Association, and Member of Law Review. And for a fun little twist to the resume, I've also included a "Personal Interests" section which includes (beware: it's a little cringe): bread and pastry baking (hit me up if you want some baked goods!), aerial dance (a PC way to say pole dancing...it's great exercise for the body and mind!), clothing design (a nod to the sewing machine I break out every now and again), and soccer.

That is, more or less, the sum total of my resume. Again, there are no obvious gender markers such as name prefixes or preferred pronouns. My name "Taylor Foland" is on the top of the page in larger text than anything else. That's about it. So, what is it about that information that leads employers to address me as Mr. Foland?

What strikes me as odd right off the bat is that a lot of the things on my resume indicate a female identity per societal standards and norms. For example, education is a field typically occupied by women and family law is largely comprised of female attorneys. If that wasn't enough, surely most people would think that leadership roles in a reproductive justice society and a women's law club screams, "female!", or that clothing design and dance are extracurriculars associated more often with women. Are the people reading my resume just progressive? Are the people reading my resume even reading it at all??

My experiences as "Mr. Foland" have lead me to consider the ways in which the entire legal system is dominated by men. Male-domination occurs at almost every stage in the process to becoming a lawyer: getting to law school, law school itself, and the legal profession. In such an environment, it is no surprise that an applicant with a gender-neutral name, regardless of the content of their resume, will be presumed male. I will focus on the final stage of domination: the legal profession.

To quickly comment on the first two, barriers often discourage women from applying to law school, and/or lead to "poorer" performances by women in law school, among other things. Some of those barriers include the lack of female law school professors and mentors, emotional labour responsibilities that women often take on in addition to their academic, financial, and personal responsibilities, and systemic sexism that expects certain behaviours of women (agreeable, smiling, pleasant) and pushes women into certain professions (aka "pink-collared jobs" such as nursing, waitressing, and teaching).

But, relevant to Mr. Foland are the barriers in the professional realm of the law, where "his" resume gets read and analyzed. Because although women enrollees have surpassed men enrollees in American law schools for the past three years, female representation in leadership positions (partners and equity partners) and retention rates of female employees demonstrate persisting inequalities.

Why do these inequalities exist? Interpretations of a 2018 Law Society survey suggest some reasons:

In an international survey of over 7,500 women lawyers conducted by the Law Society, the top three barriers to women’s career progression were reported to be unconscious bias on the part of senior colleagues (52% of respondents), an unacceptable work/life balance (48%), and a belief that the traditional networks and routes to promotion in law are male orientated (46%).

Another key factor that others writing on the topic have suggested is the "focus on presenteeism" in the legal profession, or the requirement that lawyers be present in the workplace at all times to conduct their work. This approach disproportionately turns women away from the legal profession after a while, because women often rely on flexible work schedules once starting a family (Note: there is a discussion to be had here about why women have to become more flexible, while their male partners - in heterosexual relationships - often do not).

All of these factors contribute to the male domination of the legal profession. Not only is the build up to becoming a lawyer inaccessible to women, but the profession itself is not conducive to female involvement. When it is men who typically succeed in a profession, it is not surprising that an applicant with a name sometimes given to men is presumed to be one.

Having identified that male-domination exists in the legal field, which is probably not a surprising realization, the question remains: what do we do about it? And, what do I do about my alter-ego, Mr. Foland?

In my opinion, flexibility in all workplaces for both men and women alleviates gender-based pressure to be present/perform at work in ways that go against other commitments. Next, the legal profession must ensure that there are women in senior positions, both at law schools and law firms. Up and coming female lawyers also need greater access to mentoring and sponsorship from those already in the field (e.g. breaking down gender-barriers with respect to networking events). Finally, men need to engage more directly with the equality debate in all aspects of life. 

As to what I, Mr./Ms. Foland should do, I admit that it is something I still grapple with. On the one hand, misgendering has provided me a unique advantage in interviews. Surprising (or correcting in an email) an interviewer with my true gender identity often puts me in a better position in an interview. In a weird way, I have a slight upper hand because they made a mistake.

On the other hand, I recognize the problems associated with this method, which I have followed up until this point. First, misgendering is a real problem for trans and nonbinary individuals. As a cis-female, is my capitalization of misgendering disrespectful and trivializing of trans/nonbinary issues? I think it probably is. Secondly, by failing to put gender markers on my resume, am I taking advantage of male domination by knowing I may pass as male and thus get a (potential) leg up in the application process? To what extent does feeding into the current state perpetuate it? These are all questions I have that I have not figured out the answer to. But, they are questions I will keep asking myself as I edit and submit my resume in the future.

That's all that Ms. Foland has to say about the matter for now. 

Combatting the attorney archetype

Growing up, my family instilled the belief in me that if I worked hard enough, I could make any of my dreams a reality. Attending law school was that dream for me. I believed my capacity to empathize, combined with my ambition and the skills I would learn in law school would make me an effective advocate. However, those outside of my immediate family seemed to have a different impression of my place in law school. Their comments persisted throughout my time as a law student.

"But . . . you don't seem like the lawyer-type." This is the sentiment I hear over and over again when I tell community members that I am a law student. Every time I hear that comment, I cannot help but question what qualities I am missing that make it difficult for others to perceive me (or even respect me) as a law student.

When I think about who I am as a person, a number of different traits cross my mind. For example, I would say that I am empathetic, independent, nurturing, and ambitious. Our socially constructed categories of masculinity and femininity would place independence and ambition in the former category and place empathy and nurturance in the latter category. This separate spheres ideology becomes problematic when people assign value to those categories and decide what qualities are valuable and which ones are not.

I always saw myself as an amalgamation of different qualities, but now these traits were being broken up into categories and instead of syncing up harmoniously, these traits were being weighted, categorized, and assessed differently by others – especially in professional settings. These traits had been set up on opposing sides, with the socially constructed traits of femininity (which I thought of as personal strengths) being considered professional weaknesses and liabilities. In light of this, I constantly wonder who I should be.

In their germinal law review article, Rand Jack and Dana Crowley Jack posit that a number of female professionals, especially female attorneys, have the same internal tension of defining themselves in their profession.

One solution women have adopted is to mute their “feminine” characteristics. Pixar recently released a new animated short film that illustrated this issue. Purl is the story of a ball of pink yarn who begins work at a male-dominated office. The men in the office make it clear to Purl that she doesn’t belong in the office. They ignore her ideas and exclude her from office activities. In an effort to avoid being shut out, she decides to change who she is to fit into her office’s culture – going as far as changing her appearance and speaking in a deeper voice. To her surprise, it worked.

But as Jack’s article finds, even when women mute their feminine characteristics and attempt to assert more masculine characteristics, they are stuck in a catch 22 because no matter what they do, they can never really "get it right".

If a woman chooses to reject the usual lawyer image and follow a less combative form of participation, she may be labeled too feminine, and others may doubt her fiber as a tough lawyer. A woman attorney must walk the fine line between being feminine and being assertive. . . If she is too feminine she is accused of trying to use it to her advantage and is therefore resented, but if she is equally assertive to her male counterpart, she is accused of being too aggressive.

This identity strain is an added burden on women in the workplace. As women, we exert so much energy to define the "right" persona for our office culture, that it inhibits time, effort, and energy from focusing on the work we were hired to do.

It further shakes me to my core to think that seemingly masculine traits have become the new "gender neutral" characteristics that have embodied the archetype of lawyers. Not only does this signal that women must change themselves to succeed in the legal profession, but an inherent message is sent to women that “feminine” qualities have little to no value in the workplace. It seems like I have to choose between being a lawyer or being myself.

But is it really true that adopting masculine characteristics would make me a better lawyer? Is it really true that masculinity is synonymous with professionalism? An earlier blogger on this forum, Alcestis, posted about how they didn’t agree that “becoming a man in a ‘man's world’ will help produce a better and more efficient working environment.” Just because someone embodies "feminine" characteristics, doesn't relegate their opinions and contributions as meaningless. In fact, these unique traits may help provide valuable perspectives and solutions to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the workplace.

When I think about my future as a lawyer, I think about this balancing game women must play to fit into their office culture. I also think about the importance of incorporating more "feminine" features into the work environment.

I believe that people should not have to mute characteristics society has devalued to fit in. Lawyers need to be fierce, professional, hardworking, and competent advocates. Those traits and femininity are not mutually exclusive. In fact, femininity may even enhance features essential to lawyering.

Going forward, while I will continue to hold myself to highest professional and ethical standards, I will not mute who I am as a person to fit into an office. While I don't want to be relegated as outsider, I think it would be worse to change who I am and incidentally perpetuate the devaluation of femininity in the workplace. I may not be the lawyer type, but I will do everything in my power to fight the one-dimensional notion of who a lawyer is and can be.

The benefits of a feminist legal education

After having taken a number of feminism courses in my undergraduate years as a part of my sociology degree, I figured it was only fitting to take feminist legal theory in law school. I was excited because this course offered an opportunity to take a class that did not seem like a traditional law school class but one more similar to my undergrad sociology classes. In the end the course was everything I hoped it would be, a chance to have conversations about very interesting topics without having to worry too much about the legal analysis, bar exam preparation, etc. Now that the course is over I find myself asking what the value of the class was other than providing a healthy mental break from the monotony of law school courses.

Before jumping into a discussion of the value of feminist legal theory I think it is important to define what feminist legal theory even is. The best definition I could find was provided by Leslie Francis and Patricia Smith, writing for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. They write:

"Feminist philosophy of law identifies the pervasive influence of patriarchy and masculinist norms on legal structures and demonstrates their efforts on the material condition of women and girls and those who may not conform to cisgender norms...to understand how legal institutions enforce dominant gendered and masculinist norms." 

This seems like a good place to begin. While Leslie Francis and Patricia Smith were defining "feminist philosophy of law," the same definition applies to what feminist legal theory is. At least from my limited experience, the course was a critically reflective look at the way our society is structured and the way the judiciary, executive, and legislative branches of government legally justify patriarchy. This is immensely valuable the law is limited but powerful in terms of what it can do. As aspiring lawyers it is essential that we learn to deconstruct the law critically in order to do better in shaping the legal landscape of tomorrow.

One of the aspects of law school that I have a love-hate relationship with its length. Three years of school is great because it offers us the chance to find good jobs and start earning money sooner than other professional fields. This convenience comes at a great cost, it means we have a really limited time to learn the ins and outs of procedure, professional responsibility, legal research and writing, and specialization in a certain field of law. In this rush to learn how to follow the rules and be competent attorneys there is hardly enough time to deconstruct the law. There is little to no time to stop and wonder why certain aspects of the profession are the way that they are, to question whether there are better alternatives. In this crazy three year rush, patriarchy is reinforced. Unsurprisingly, the legal professional is one that has been historically shaped by white men and our current legal customs are the legacy of that. From what women are allowed to wear and how they are allowed to speak to sexual harassment in the workplace and the lack of female law firm partners, patriarchy is alive and well.  In the face of all of this, the value of feminist legal theory should be obvious. Any opportunity to exam and question in the law is valuable.

Feminism classes are clearly valuable in my eyes but this is still not a widely accepted viewpoint. While more and more people are seeing the value of feminism classes, it is still more popular to dismiss these types of courses as fringe classes for radical men-hating women. As Anna Diamond describes, this is the case for many reasons including misconceptions about what feminism is, misguided beliefs that we are in a "post-feminist" society, and doubts as to the real-world value of feminism classes.

It is ironic that one of the most popular reasons why people discount feminism classes is that they think those kinds of courses have nothing to offer them or they they think those courses are only meant for women. One of the reasons why I think feminism classes are essential is because of their intersectionality. As Ms. Diamond describes it, "Intersectionality tells us that there is no singular experience for women because of the way gender works in conjunction with race, ethnicity, social class, and sexuality." Indeed feminism does touch upon all of these topics and more. By creating the avenue to think critically about other aspects of society, which are undoubtedly relevant to everyone, feminism classes truly are classes that everyone could benefit from.

Ultimately, I found feminist legal theory to be a thrilling class that I very much looked forward to. As is typically the case with these types of courses, the class could be a bit of an echo-chamber. What I mean by that is that in general the class tended to agree on most subjects. While this did not hamper conversation, it does mean that the people who would probably benefit most from speaking about these kinds of subjects were not in the room. Nevertheless, the class was a valuable experience. If anything, I believe that classes such as these should be required of all law students the way professional responsibility and legal research and writing are. Perhaps then we could begin to think critically about the profession we are going into instead of being forced to conform to archaic customs.

#LeanIn – Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead attempts to take steps towards equalizing the gender disparity that exists in top level professional positions, as well as positions of power in general. She asserts that focusing on the "internal barriers" (e.g. internalized feminized passivity), as opposed to the "external barriers" (e.g. institutional forms of oppression) is crucial in order for women to gain power.

Sandberg's main solution is a simple matter of women "leaning in," which entails women shed their negative gendered image as timid and un-efficacious subjects. Instead, become more assertive and determined in their pursuits. Although I see the merit in Sheryl Sandberg's philosophy, her narrow and problematic conception of gender must be refined if her proposal is to become more feasible.

Before delving into what I consider the problematic aspect of her suggestion, I should give a positive account of what her theory would look like in practice. Sandberg is specifically addressing the issue of gender inequalities within the professional world. She expresses  this inequality as a function of the various sets of barriers that women continually face when attempting to move up in the professional world.

Consequently, for Sandberg, the issue becomes a matter of identifying what those barriers are and how women should approach the issue of tearing them down. Sandberg dichotomizes the barriers into external and internal barriers. The external barriers, as understood by Sandberg, are those which present significant difficulties that are not in the control of the individual, erected by society.

The internal barriers are the internalized negative messages that women are bombarded with during their formative years. These messages confer upon women the normative notion that they should not be assertive, aggressive, outspoken, or more successful than men. As a result, women are conditioned to become less ambitious than men and to accept their inevitable subordination as second-class citizens – or so the story goes.

Sandberg primarily focuses on the internal barriers, because she believes that we can more easily dismantle these. Her reasoning seems to be as follows: given that institutional barriers are outside the control of a single individual, it might prove to be a more efficient method of instantiating social change by addressing issues which are immediately accessible and alterable (i.e. the internal psychological constitution of an individual).

The problem with this strategy is that Sandberg seems to problematically take for granted that gender is simply an ascribed property to an individual, that one has a free and unrestricted choice to enact. From the manner in which Sheryl Sandberg speaks of gendered behavior, in lines such as: "aggressive women violate the unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct;" "from the moment we are born, boys and girls are treated differently;" and "the gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives;" I infer that she is operating under the assumption that because gender is merely a social construction (and not an immutable biological reality), she believes that individuals can freely choose whether or not to enact their ascribed masculine or feminine properties.

The concern here then is that Sheryl Sandberg fails to recognize the complexity of how gender operates within our society, and the pervasiveness of it, in which individuals almost feel a compulsory response to enact a certain kind of gender. To put it more succinctly: the problematic aspect is not the claim that one should do gender differently, rather it is the supposition that one has the free range to do so.

In our heavily gendered society, our everyday interactions are instances of doing gender. More importantly, insofar as one does gender, one does not do gender individually, rather one performs gender by interacting with an equally well-versed individual who has the capacity to judge ones performance and hold the performer accountable for performing their gender correctly.

In this way, a structure of accountability is created which functions as a system of social control by way of reinforcing the notion of correct or proper gender performance. A corollary aspect of this social accountability structure is that the endeavor of doing gender then becomes both interactional and institutional. In other words, gender performance is not merely an individual enactment of gendered behavior, but rather it functions as a complex system of interrelations between individuals and institutional arrangements.

Consequently, one can see how Sheryl Sandberg's suggestion of "leaning in" is too individualistic to become a potential solution to the systemic problem of gender disparity in the professional field.

How to Respond to this Election - Part II "Get Legal!"

In part I of this post, I showed a great amount of my chagrin and sorrow about the election. I still doubtless feel those things, but at this point, it's more important for me to discover avenues of hope and empowerment. In order to do so, I look to the women that I love.

There are a few women I know that are nearly unperturbed by this election. It has impacted them, but they have not missed a beat. In fact, their urgency to work hard is only rising. I was curious as to how these women could be so stalwart; how they could be so disappointed in the election, but resist feeling disheartened. Then something occurred to me. These women have the most faith in the US legal system of all the women I know. I wanted to find a door into the Church of Legal Faith, myself. So here goes.

When in need of legal-lady-power, I often look to one of my heroes, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She must be particularly aggravated with the fact of our new President Elect, whom she deems inconsistent and egotistical —I second that motion, Justice Ginsburg, and despite your graceful apology, we all know where you stand— but in the aftermath, she continues to be a rockstar on the bench and off. Perhaps this is because RBG originally became interested in the law during a time I liken very much to the milieu of our nation today: the Red Scare (there is some agreement about this comparison). In a heartfelt interview with NPR's Nina Totenberg (podcast version on What It Takes), Justice Ginsburg spoke of an undergraduate constitutional law research assistantship at Cornell in the early 1950's. For her RA position, Justice Ginsburg was tasked with reading transcripts of hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee. She told Totenberg:

"[F]rom those transcripts I saw that there was no one standing up for these people reminding our Congress that we have a 1st amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and we have a 5th amendment guarantee against self-incrimination. So I thought that was a good thing to do; that a lawyer could have a professional career, could have paid job . . . and also volunteer services in hard times to make things a little better. That’s when I had the idea that I would like to be a lawyer."

Amen, Justice Ginsburg. These are definitely hard times. I therefore intend to look to the lawyers who, in the face of a Trump Presidency, are planning to do exactly what inspired RBG to become an attorney: make things a little better. Here are my heroes of the day:

1. The Southern Poverty Law Center: SPLC has been doing amazing work lately, particularly around the surge of hate speech and violence that has arisen in the wake of the election. In their publication Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election, they urge the President Elect to "do everything in his power . . . to reach out to the communities his words have injured" as opposed to "feign[ing] ignorance." They have also been collecting extraordinary amounts of data: observing that 867 hate incidents have occurred nationally since Trump's election. In addition, they continue to fight hate through impact litigation such as Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc. v. United States Department of Homeland Security, et al. where their complaint argued that Department of Homeland Security and ICE violated the Freedom of Information Act by withholding information on raids that targeted over 100 women and children in Texas.

2. California's likely new Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who recently tweeted: "#DREAMers are some of the most courageous people I’ve ever met. We stand with you & are ready to fight for you", says he intends to fight to retain California's liberal clean energy, environmental, criminal justice and immigration policies. If he does so, he might lead California into being "the tip of the spear for state-based resistance to Trump and the Republican party’s inhumane vision for our country."

3. National Center for Lesbian Rights: NCLR has updated its blog several times regarding the election, including informational posts about Transgender Rights, consoling its constituents that marriage equality will hold strong due to stare decisis, and campaigning against Jeff Sessions' nomination. In addition, NCLR continues Equality Utah v. Utah State Board of Education, the case they filed on October 21st, 2016, challenging state laws that ban positive speech about LGBT people in Utah public schools.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/article118333013.html#storylink=cpy

4. The American Civil Liberties Union: There was very little that buoyed me up on the days following the election, however, the ACLU's homepage made me smile every time I clicked. Trump's face was plastered it with bold words hanging in the air beside him: See You In Court. The ACLU leveled up from that rallying cry, calling the President Elect a "one man constitutional crisis" and, wasting no time, released a 27-page brief entitled the "Trump Memos" that brilliantly displayed the unconstitutionality of Trump's policies regarding mass deportation, large-scale surveillance, profiling, and attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade. Yesterday, the ACLU lived up to its promise and joined with the Center for Reproductive Rights and Planned Parenthood. They filed simultaneous lawsuits concerning unnecessary abortion restrictions in Alaska, Missouri, and North Carolina. Their message was clear: "we'll see [people like] you in court" before you even take the Presidential Oath, Mr. Trump.

I may still be a Legal Faith agnostic, I can't lie. But these warriors of the legal system have encouraged me, and more than anything, reminded me why I am am joining the Profession. Thank you, SPLC, the State Government of California, NCLR, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and Center for Reproductive Rights. I'm grateful. 

In my gratitude, I'll leave you with the words of NCLR Executive Director Kate Kendell:

"Together, we fight on and we fight back. We must harness our grief, fear and outrage and serve justice. Onward. . ."

If a woman finds sanctuary in her work, does that make her less real?

A friend of mine read a recent blog post that I wrote about Hillary Clinton, and emailed me her passionate support of my viewpoint. It seemed an innocuous and pleasing email, until I realized that my friend endures an injustice that I hadn't often considered. My friend, let's call her M, was particularly taken with a New York Times article cited in the blog post called Why Is Clinton Disliked?. This article, penned by David Brooks, essentially determines that Hillary's overwhelming issue is that she isn't intimate enough to the public because she is a workaholic.

Brooks goes on to say that for people who are "consumed by their professional activities," the "professional role comes to dominate the personality and encroaches on the normal intimacies of the soul." This comment made me wonder, are men frequently expected to engage in "intimacies of the soul" in our society? I think not. Brooks is thus likely criticizing women "workaholics" in particular, as opposed to workaholics in general.

The idea of this article deeply troubled M. She is extraordinarily career-oriented, and she was particularly bothered by the ending of the Brooks article: "Even successful lives need these sanctuaries — in order to be a real person instead of just a productive one. It appears that we don’t really trust candidates who do not show us theirs." To this, M responded: "Which begs the question: what if a person finds sanctuary in their work? Does this make them less 'real'?" She was worried, in particular, if it made her less real. I'm worried it might make me less real, too.

This worry led me to dig into a question that I thought feminism and our great nation had answered long ago: what do we think of passionately working (er . . .'workaholic') women? What I found was horrifying. I found a Huffington Post article  called 10 Things Nobody Tells You About Being A Single, Career-Oriented Woman in Your Twenties, whose main gist was to discourage women from being career-oriented in their twenties, because, "you’ll wake up one day without having a husband or kids, which is not what you wanted." This article also contained this gem:

6. Men who you meet socially will not necessarily love your success (they may even be intimidated by it). 

Remember the bell curve? Well, you’re toward one end of it. And there’s a good chance that a lot of people who you meet socially won’t be on the same end of that bell curve as you. Suddenly, you’re either at work with your equally-achieving, married male colleagues or you’re out at the bar dancing to 2 Chainz. Not great.

To be fair, the author of the above article had recently been dumped for being 'career-oriented.' However, I couldn't believe her words. I thought that she must be the only person on the internet following so heartily in Phyllis Schlafly's footsteps, but of course not. While British media messages encourage women to 'get fertile,' here in the US, Penelope Trunk encourages you to find a partner fast. Here, a working mother loses custody of her children to their father, unemployed for years, who she had "begged to get a job" to help support the family. This is apparently very common.

But what are women to do in a world where they are seen as less reliable, or less hire-able because of the assumption that they are less invested in work than men? And how are women to rebound when they're also seen as breaking the rules if they do put in the extra hours, succeed, ask for higher pay, or promote themselves?

It seems a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation to me. So what can M., who loves her work, is captivated by it, who finds her work a sanctuary, do? What can I do?

I think the best we can do, as women, is to find encouragement and power in a variety of places, and continue to do what feels the most right for our own lives. One of the places both M. and I find solace is in the professors we admire. These are professionals on the forefront of the fight for disability rights, women's rights, privacy rights, and more, and they still fight for their work-life balances-- whatever that means to them. Sometimes life can be work and work can be life and that's OK, too. One admirable professor, Thomas Joo, says this about the study of law:

The lawyer learns to speak the language of the law, and in that language, he or she not only speaks the law, but also speaks about the law. Or, to put it another way, the difference between law and zoology is that zoologists do not train to become elephants. Nor do elephants bother studying zoology. But legal education requires learning both to think like a lawyer and to critically analyze that method of thinking—in other words, to become both elephant and zoologist.

Professional women must do this, too. We must learn both to think like "the ideal worker" who excels in systems built to embrace men, and we also must learn to critically analyze that method of thinking. We must resist the pressure of patriarchal work environments and look with a critical eye at their legacies. Yet we must still try to live our own ideal of success and fulfillment in the patriarchal system as it is, despite being shamed or seen as "less real." What other choice do we have than to be both the elephant and the zoologist?

This tactic of changing the system from within it might just work, too. Perhaps, with innovations like "Worker Coops" and "Results-Only Work Environments" (ROWE was developed by two women), the woman who finds sanctuary in her work may be the wave of the future. Go M., go! Keep your nose in your appellate briefs and books and articles. Publish as much as you can. I believe in you. In my eyes, you are the best kind of real.

Hillary as mediator: why the job of POTUS might suit her more than you think . . .

For several months now, I’ve been wanting to love Hillary. She’s already my candidate because of the lesser-of-two-evils-condition of this election, but I’ve felt very conflicted. I don’t resonate with her as a person, but I get instantaneous tears in my eyes when I watch her enter a stage. That woman, right there, that person of my gender, could be our next president. I want this so badly I get a lump in my throat typing it.

. . . But I’m still not able to connect with Hillary. And I’m not alone. I decided to do some soul-searching (and more research) into what makes Hillary less accessible than other politicians, though she is a powerhouse of a lawmaker. Once you look into her approval ratings, what you see is that the nation approves of Hillary more when she’s working in a job than when she’s trying to garner their approval in a campaign. This is strange, but you start to see the pattern all over the place: she frequently delivers stilted, 'shrill' speeches, but when she was a Senator, she amended 67 bills in eight years and served on five senate committees. As Secretary of State, she brought Iran to the negotiating table, improved US-Cuba relations, increased exports to China, and more. These are no small feats, and people liked her while she was accomplishing them. So where is the disconnect between her success and her, well . . . popularity?

The thing that makes Hillary less accessible has a name. In his illuminating article Understanding Hillary: Why the Clinton America Sees Isn’t the Clinton Colleagues Know, Ezra Klein calls this “the Gap:”

There is the Hillary Clinton I watch on the nightly news and that I read described in the press. She is careful, calculated, cautious. Her speeches can sound like executive summaries from a committee report, the product of too many authors, too many voices, and too much fear of offense. . . And then there is the Hillary Clinton described to me by people who have worked with her, people I admire, people who understand Washington in ways I never will.

I now see exactly what Klein sees in Hillary. What’s more, I have come to see that the Gap is why I think she will make an incredible President.

As this is legal blog, I’d like to frame things from a lawyering prospective. Clinton is an attorney, as are over half of past presidents. It thus seems fitting to apply the profession to her demeanor. I feel there are really three types of lawyers. There are (1) the orating-suave-extroverted types, (2) the attention-to-detail-introverted-sharp-witted types, and (3) the mediating-community-organizing-consensus-building types. Most lawyer-politicians fit entirely into category (1), or are sometimes a mix between (1) and (2) (read: Bernie Sanders). The category (1) lawyers are the ones that have the most success with campaigning: they are affable, charming, and thrilled to hear themselves speak. However, Hillary is right between lawyers (2) and (3), she has nearly none of the natural orator in her. She, in contrast to nearly all of her peers, is a listener. Though she was a litigator in the past, I think that Hillary’s personality makes her more of a perfect mediator.

She embodies all the qualities of a great mediator (learned in my Mediation course with Steven Rosenberg, here at UC Davis). First, she’s an incredibly active listener embarking on “listening tours” to kick off her last two campaigns and is inclined to use what she hears (e.g. ‘card-table time’ wherein she re-reads all her notes from listening and develops policy). Second, her work-style is collaborative and consensus building. Though this is sometimes to her detriment, it gains her great loyalty and gives her a large network of people from whom she can ask favors and ideas. Third, she is flexible, and fourth she is creative in developing thoughtful initiatives like this one. Finally, Hillary is persistent. It doesn’t take much to see that she has been working toward higher political office -perhaps even toward this very race- since possibly the mid-eighties.

To my mind, these qualities make her a perfect fit for the presidential office. Indeed, Matthew Yglesias is in accord in his Vox article Hillary Clinton is bad at speeches for the exact reasons she'd be a good president:

The very qualities that tend to make Clinton bad at speechwriting — a penchant for the least-common-denominator and a passion for making sure no small thing is forgotten — are qualities that are extremely relevant to effective leadership in a political system that’s built to favor transactional relationships over big ideas.

I’m interested in a president who listens, who is consensus building, who is flexible and creative, and who remains persistent despite the great quantity of hate coming her way. I'm enthused by what I now know about Hillary's style of leadership. It is worth noting that all of these Mediator qualities are also seen as traditional female qualities (female leadership strengths tend to be undervalued, BTW; also see an unpacking of the complicated concept of female ‘traits’ in Judith Baer’s book Our Lives Before the Law: Constructing a Feminist Jurisprudence). However, great Mediator traits aren't solely ascribable to females, in fact there are more males in the Alternative Dispute Resolution professions in the US than there are females.

I am thus not persuaded that it’s simply Hillary’s femaleness that informs this mediation-type leadership style; women have been shown to take all kinds of approaches to accomplish mediated results. I think Hillary has simply discovered the method of governance that works for her. I am inspired by that method.

Now that I'm learning about mediation, I'm likely to favor it over the exorbitant cost of litigation. I’m similarly inclined, based on similar learning, to favor a mediating president over a fighter who may cost the country a lot in the long-run.

I am now overwhelmingly on board with scores of other women who support Hillary. I’ll sing that fight song with you every time, Ms. Clinton. There’s that darn lump in my throat again.

"She Wore What?" Dress Codes and the Male Critique of Women's Presentation of their Bodies

Last month, I attended a mock trial competition in Arizona. A few weeks before we left, my male coach told our all-girl team “Just be sure to wear skirts, not pant suits. I mean, I know it’s outdated but there are some old fogeys in Arizona!” And he’s right – there are old fogeys in Arizona, and everywhere else. But just how far do we have to go to accommodate them? As attorneys, is it our responsibility to our clients to dress in a certain manner in order to be more convincing to old fogeys? (For the record, I wore my pantsuit in Arizona).

By now, we’ve probably all heard of Tennessee Judge Royce Taylor who developed a dress code for female attorneys in his courtroom in 2013.  The memo from the local bar association said the problem of appropriate female attire had arisen because “women attorneyswere not being held to the same standard as the men.” Females were expected to wear jackets “with sleeves below the elbow” or business attire. Sleeveless shirts and mini skirts were specifically prohibited; in fact, the judge held a few femaleattorneys in contempt of court for wearing inappropriate outfits.

Does focusing on appearance help the legal community maintain a certain level of professionalism, or does it simply reinforce social narratives about how women should present their bodies to the general public? Does tying the way that women dress to professionalism reinforce narratives about women’s sexuality, and perhaps specifically their ability to act outside of the sexuality that the male gaze persists in seeing, and policing?

I may be extreme, but the message I’m hearing is this: If a woman wants to work in a professional space, she needs to restrain her sexuality to a sufficient extent that men are satisfied. Maybe that means jackets that cover the elbow; maybe that means closed toed shoes; maybe that means no mini skirts. Men and responsible women need to step in and tell these ladies how to clothe themselves adequately. School dress codes have also consistently treated “appropriate” dress in very gendered ways. Find an interesting perspectives here, and here. 

Obviously, I am not advocating for provocative or sloppy dress in court, per se. I’m proud to be entering a very professional career, in a community with high expectations for practitioners. But I hope that over the course of my career, I will be perceived as an intelligent, effective advocate regardless of what I choose to wear on my body. I realize that I will be perceived by others in part based on what I choose to wear; I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want more control over those perceptions by deciding for myself what to wear and what message to send. Instead of being told what not to wear, I would appreciate making the choice for myself and allowing those on the bench or in the courtroom to decide how they feel about my advocacy for themselves. 

  

Why Aren’t We Doing More to Stop Workplace Harassment?

News broke last week that Sujit Choudhry, Dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, was being placed on indefinite leave after his executive assistant filed suit alleging sexual harassment. Two days later, after a vocal outcry from alumni and the public, Dean Choudhry resigned. The details of Berkeley’s apparent mishandling of the incident were explored by the SF Chronicle in some depth yesterday in an article tellingly entitled, “UC Berkeley has history of tolerating sexual harassment.” When the harassment was first reported, Choudhry was given a one-year, ten-percent pay cut and ordered to write his victim a letter of apology (oh, and pay for counseling on his own dime) – all in secret. The leave and subsequent resignation did not occur until the executive assistant filed suit, thereby making the story public. Michael O’Hare, a Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley, put it best when he wrote that the school’s initial punishment “might as well be an open letter to women on campus telling them ‘if powerful people around here mistreat you, we will protect them and punish you if you complain.’”

The incident stirred up many personal feelings for me. When I left my chemical engineering career for the law, I hoped that I was also leaving behind the misogyny of the male-dominated engineering field as well. Surely, I thought, attorneys who learned all about the law in school would understand better than anyone the problems of discrimination and harassment, especially in the workplace. It turns out I was wrong. One survey has found that thirty percent of women in the legal field report facing sexual harassment, only one percentage point behind science/tech/engineering/math (aka the “STEM” fields). As horrifying as these numbers seem, they pale in comparison to the harassment faced by women in the service industry. A 2014 survey by non-profit Restaurant Opportunities Center United found that of women working in the restaurant business, 66% had been sexually harassed by managers, 80% by co-workers, and 78% by customers.

Sexual harassment is an incredibly important issue for women in the workplace. While I am lucky enough not to have been a victim myself, I have seen it happen to others and I know the trauma it can cause. Addressing the problem requires serious leadership from workplace managers and supervisors. So why do we keep trying to fix it with terrible, cheesy, and downright offensive sexual harassment training videos and sessions? Until we start treating sexual harassment as a serious issue, rather than just an annual mandatory hour you have to spend watching a video from the ‘90s, I don’t see the problem improving anytime soon. Another problem is that these training videos typically seem to focus on blatantly obvious examples of harassment. The videos that I’ve had to watch at schools and workplaces all failed to recognize the micro-aggressions that are just as problematic, and far more frequent.

A video went viral a few years ago when a woman simply filmed herself walking through the streets of New York City, documenting the constant street harassment women face every day. Surely the generation of Twitter, Tumblr, and memes can come up with something better than the horrible sexual harassment training videos we get now. (And please, let’s fix it before I have to take the undoubtedly terrible sexual harassment training that I was told last week I have to take as a UC employee…ironically in an email sent the same day the Choudhry lawsuit was filed).

Family planning at the cusp of a career (Part II): Get busy fertilizing or get busy freezing?

In my last post, I discussed an all-too-familiar concern of many young professional women (and a recent campaign bringing it to the fore): the competing desire to have a successful career and the ever-increasing risk of age-related infertility. The problem, of course, is that many young, professional women “spend [their] prime baby-making years in the trenches” and put children on hold until later in life. The average age for entering medical school students at UC Davis, for example, is 25, making the average age at graduation roughly 29. The next three to five years are spent in grueling residency programs, resulting in new doctors finally beginning their careers between the ages of 32 and 34. By then, even the healthiest young female doctor’s fertility has already started its rapid, irreversible decline, while the young woman has barely had time to establish herself in her profession.

The response to this dilemma from some, including the aforementioned campaign, is to pressure women to conceive earlier lest the prospective mother “fritter away” her twenties. (N.b., Of course, I can only speak accurately for myself here, but I would imagine many women would not characterize the time they spent in graduate school or the professional trenches -- working toward their goals and overcoming ubiquitous male preference -- as time “frittered” away.). Other women, though, are turning to technology to give them ultimate control over family planning. How? By flash-freezing their healthy eggs and storing them for future use.

The flash-freezing process is fairly simple and can be completed over the course of a few months: the woman takes hormones throughout her menstrual cycle and is monitored for a period of time by physicians until her eggs are ready to harvest. At that time, they are removed trans-vaginally, frozen, and preserved until the woman is ready to have them fertilized. Cost estimates for the procedure range from roughly $2,200 to $18,000, and the technique has dramatically increased in popularity since last fall, when the American Society for Reproductive Medicine lifted its “experimental” label on the practice. Since then, a number of women, including Yale professor Marcia Inhorn, have published books and op-eds imploring their younger counterparts to take advantage of the technology while their ova are still healthy and, as a result, take greater control over their careers.

But the procedure, unsurprisingly, is not without risk and certainly gives rise to other ethical concerns. First, the technology is so young that there has been very little research done as to its long-term success. Indeed, as author Miriam Zoll recently wrote, “The only thing we really know about [the procedure] is that an estimated 1000 babies have been born to women younger than thirty years of age who were facing life-threatening illnesses. . . . We don’t know if these live births were the result of 3,000 or 10,000 trials. We have no information about how many miscarriages or stillbirths may have ensued, and we have no idea how flash freezing might affect offspring’s health later in life.” Further, as Professor Inhorn has acknowledged, as a result of the availability of the procedure, “employers may come to expect women to postpone childbearing through egg freezing” and “[w]omen may be pushed into a burdensome and costly medical procedure that cannot provide guaranteed future fertility outcomes.”

The counter to the latter concerns, I think, is that similar arguments could be made against various forms of contraceptives, but since their introduction in the early twentieth century, the feminist response has been predominantly positive; indeed, the increased ability to plan one’s family has largely been credited as one of the primary reasons women have gradually moved out of the domestic sphere and into the marketplace. Might this same technology effect a similar result? That is, now that young women have entered the professional workforce, perhaps allowing them to postpone childbirth into their forties -- when they are still able to carry children and presumably are in better positions, professionally -- will increase the number of women who make it to the “top” of corporations and law firms around the country. Now that we have our foot in the door, perhaps this technology is the ticket -- at least for some women -- to finally climb the corporate ladder on their own terms and at their own pace.

Family planning at the cusp of a career (Part I): Beating the clock

Practically every time I see my family, I’m asked for an update as to when my husband and I are going to have children, and it bothers me. It really, really bothers me. But my problem isn’t that they are holding me to some traditional, domestic female standard or that they want me to duck out of the workforce for a few years -- they aren’t, and they don’t. They ask because in the past, they’ve heard me talk about how much I want children, and they ask because they know that being a mother is what I want to do. In fact, my problem is not with them or their question at all. My problem lies with the ominous internal reminder that inevitably follows: you’re not having kids anytime soon -- not with those student loans, not with that new job, and certainly not with those lofty career goals. And so another family conversation ends abruptly with my dismissive, standby response: “We’ll get to it eventually.”

Lately, though, I have been unable to escape the message that “eventually” is not soon enough. Granted, I’m still young -- not yet 30 -- but pregnancy (much less childrearing) still hasn’t found a place in my five-year-plan. And that, according to a number of women, is simply alarming. In fact, “Get Britain Fertile” a new ad campaign in the UK, where the average age at first pregnancy is 30, is determined to remind young women like myself that “careers and finances [may] seem important, but you only have a small fertility window.” (Gee, thanks a lot, GBF.) One of the faces of the campaign, 46-year-old, successful British TV personality Kate Garraway, specifically wants to caution women that they should “start thinking about their fertility at a younger age than [her] generation did” and to “get prepared and make informed choices early so there is no chance of sleepwalking into infertility” later on. Ms. Garraway had her two children at 38 and 42 and deeply regrets that today, her “fertility door is slamming shut.”

In theory, the campaign is innocent enough -- Ms. Garraway and her co-ambassador, Zita West, seem genuinely concerned about educating young women as to the effects of age on fertility. Yet, it is worth noting, I think, that the effort is sponsored by First Response pregnancy tests, and the name itself -- “Get Britain Fertile” seems to be more of a push for pregnancy than a call for increased fertility awareness. Further, the information the ambassadors have distributed thus far is not exactly being presented in a strictly-PSA format. Indeed, the photo slapped across British newspapers to promote the nascent campaign was the photo below: one of Ms. Garraway dressed as what some critics are calling a “cartoonishly ancient-looking pregnant woman.”

Get Britain Fertile, rather than simply educating, latches on to a fear already present in every young professional woman who wants to have children and rattles that fear into a panic with a message worthy of a Jack LaLanne infomercial: Act now! The miracle of creating human life can be yours -- but only for a limited time! You’ll look like this old woman before you know it… Conceive today and receive a FREE First Response EPT.

Whether the message is fear-mongering or not, though, it still fails to address the campaign’s ultimate underlying problem: how to embrace motherhood at a young age (which they certainly seem to be advocating) while still keeping a professional career on track. Tellingly, Ms. Garraway herself has had a busy fifteen years in the entertainment industry, but when asked about the double-standard her campaign seems to reinforce on young women seeking successful careers, she simply offered the following moderately coherent but impossibly nonresponsive answer:

“[W]e applaud young career women in their twenties and then before you know it you find yourself as I did at a friend’s wedding and being quizzed by everyone about why you haven’t got round to reproducing yet. If we listened to society we would be in a total spin. I am hoping this campaign will help everyone who is interested to get the information and facts they need to equip themselves to make their own life choices.” 

I, too, hope that anyone seeking to make family planning decisions is adequately informed of their options. But I also hope that British women are strong enough to recognize that three-kids-by-thirty is not the only path, nor is it necessarily ideal.

As for me, the marketers at Get Britain Fertile, which is scheduled to officially launch this week, can turn their attention elsewhere. Their message has been received, I consider myself warned: the clock, as I’ve known since childhood, ticks on, and one day it will stop. And notwithstanding the modern, vibrant conversations about leaning in, making it work, and having -- or rather, not having -- it all, I am still ultimately left with the unsatisfying conclusion that if I want to be a mother, the question is not whether to sacrifice my career, but when.

Tick-tock.

Negotiating with Two X-Chromosomes: An Account from the Trenches

I won't speak for anyone but myself: I hate negotiating for salary. (Although thankfully this class has convinced me to always at least TRY to negotiate for a higher salary, just to avoid becoming another tragic female Asian-American stereotype)

I vastly dislike this about myself - and to me, it makes very little sense. Raised by the original Tiger Mom/Grandma/Sister/Uncle/Stuffed Animal, I learned early on that you only get out of the world what you beat and drag out of it. Whenever I wanted to go on a field trip at school, I had to write persuasive reports detailing the reasons for each expenditure and attach a thorough cost-benefit analysis. Every movie, every trip to the mall. These reports were almost always denied, so rejection and I are old friends.

 I bartered every day at lunch, and spent all my summers in Taiwan and Asia - where people haggle everywhere from night markets to sit-down restaurants to hair salons, and I held my own. I still have no fear (or shame) in haggling with merchants today, and you would think all this training should make me a ruthless negotiator, never backing down from what is rightfully mine. I subscribe religiously to the tenet that when negotiating, if you don't hear the word "no" at least once - you have failed. 

But gradually something changed - I want to say it was middle/high school, and sometime after I stopped regularly visiting Taiwan (where I was born). I really wonder if my American-ization and coming of age in New York/California has given rise to this inexplicable, uncomfortable anxiety.  

Allow me to illustrate with a case study from a reditt post: 

The original poster, “techmanager12345,” is a woman who worked for a large, multinational tech company. She negotiates with new hires to set salary, although she specifies that she does not set the wages and all her offers require HR approval. She revealed that she regularly hired women for 65-75% of what men received as salary.

“I am sick of it, here is why it happens, and how you can avoid it.”

The poster recounted interviewing her third new hire this month – 2 women and 1 man, the latter receiving a substantially higher salary as a result of negotiation. She expresses her exasperation at this recurring scenario: "often a woman will enter the salary negotiation phase and I'll tell them a number will be sent to them in a couple days. Usually we start around $45k for an entry level position. 50% to 60% of the women I interview simply take this offer." In contrast, almost 90% of the men she interviews immediately ask for more upon getting the offer. 

"It's insane, I already know I can get authorization for more if you simply refuse."

From our hirer's view, this is not patriarchy at work - there is nothing setting women back to the 79-cent-to-a-male-dollar ratio. No malicious corporate agenda, no higher-ups who want to enforce the glass ceiling, no old grouchy spectacle'd senior partner who wants the uppity young women in the office to go back to skirt-suits. In scenarios like this one, the only problem...is women.

Our original poster goes on to clarify that "our process, despite the pay gap, is identical for men and women." The company starts with phone interviews, then a personal and technical interview. Women and men make it through these rounds of interviews at roughly equal numbers - but once salary negotiations start, the women don't keep up. Simply, that they don't ask for more. 

The poster goes on to critique that another major mistake is how women ask for more. "In general, the women I have negotiated with will say 45k is not enough and they need more, but not give a number. I will then usually give a nominal bump to 48k or 50k." The poster reports that her company's policy does not allow her to bump more than 5k over the initial offer unless the hiree specifically requests more. Therefore, when men frequently come back with a number  from 65k to 75k, she will negotiate down from there. But after this phase, almost all women will take the offer or move on to somewhere else, never knowing they could have gotten more if they had just asked.

At the end of the day, most of the women our poster hires makes between 45k and 50k, whereas the men make between 60k and 70k. Combined with the fact that women are less likely to ask for raises and do so far less often, the disparity only grows.

To offer the light at the end of the tunnel, our poster also brings the story of "the highly aggressive, very smart, very confident woman who got the most out of us." This woman nearly doubled the initial offer, which was already quite high due to how this woman had marketed herself. Food for thought?

In a 2012 survey by LinkedIn which queried 2,500 professionals in eight countries, 39% of American women reported feeling anxiety when it comes to negotiating - the highest reported anxiety rate for any nationality-gender combination. In short, American women  feel more anxiety when negotiating for job salaries than An article in Forbes  reports that American women feel more anxiety when negotiating for job salaries than any other subgroup in the LinkedIn study. According to the numbers, fewer than 26% of women feel comfortable negotiating compared to nearly 40% of men. “Women are certainly less confident than men when it comes to negotiations,” says author and Forbes Staff Writer Selena Rezvani. 

In closing, I leave you with some excerpted negotiating tips for women, from a variety of sources from Forbes to OpenForum to the Washington Post: 

• Don't be afraid to ask for more, it's not insulting or in any way going to affect your ability to be hired (we can always say no)
• When you ask for more, give a number! If you let me pick, I will continue to lowball it.
• Ask for raises, confident people get them more often than high performers in a heavy bureaucracy.
• DON'T say "I'm sorry": apologizing in the negotiating room lessens the weight of your argument. Just stop apologizing, period. Don't discount your worth.
• When responding to rejection, or blowback: don't get mad. Be measured and direct the conversation to a resolution. Say, "I'm surprised that you would pay me anything less than market value."
• Talk about facts, data, and information. Do your research on the salary of your peers. Once you talk about feelings, you lose credibility. Asking the other person how they feel can be off-putting. 
• DON'T accept the first offer. 
• If possible, always make the first proposal. Start high or low enough to permit them to make at least three concessions. 
• Call on delays when needed: take time to think things through or involve third-party opinion. It's ok to say "I'll think about that and get back to you." Take a step back.
• Use silence: staying quiet for a few seconds is most important at two critical junctures in a negotiation: right after making a request, and right after your counterpart answers. Don't add words during this silence to soften the blow. Stay strong!
• Acknowledge the Relationship Elephant: keep a cooperative attitude and promote the sense that "it's you and me versus the problem" rather than "it's you versus me." 
• Direct eye contact: maintaining consistent, direct eye contact says volumes about your level of engagement and your focus on the discussion at hand, especially if things get contentious. Maintaining eye contact also shows you're confident in your position and that you see your counterpart as a peer and equal.
• Be polite, be courteous, and be professional, but don't back down.

Did you find any of these recommendations helpful? Enlightening? Obvious? Patronizing? Dumb? Let me know in the comments. 

Women's law firms (Part 1)

As a part of my duties as a legal assistant before I came to law school, I sent a congratulatory letter to a law firm in Oakland on behalf of my female boss. The law firm had not realized a victory; rather my boss wanted to congratulate the law firm because it had opened as an all-women law firm. This memory made me curious about women-run law firms and what they mean for women's struggle to gain greater parity in the legal profession.

According to an article here from 2008, women-owned law firms are rare nationwide.  In an Internet search to find women-only law firms I came up with mixed results. It was difficult to find law firms like Schroder, Joseph & Associates, LLP or C2 Law, where all of the attorneys (and sometimes all the support staff) were women. As a side note, Schroder, Joseph & Associates, LLP gained some notoriety a few years ago for a series of provocative ads that used slogans like "Labor Pains? Talk to us. (We're women...we get it.) Feminist Legal Theory addressed this controversy here. The ABA does not seem to collect data on women-owned or all-women law firms. Even a search within the database of the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms yielded only one all-female law firm in California. Rather, on the database I kept encountering law firms that had male and female attorneys, yet were "women-owned." 

In my search for the original law firm that had prompted my curiosity I came across Goldfarb & Lipman LLP. The home page of the firm's website stated it was a women-owned law firm that the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) had certified. According to the WBENC, to qualify as such a business it must be 51% "owned, controlled, operated, and managed by a woman or women." In addition, the business must go through a formal site visit and documentation process. The WBENC claims that the certification gives women-owned business an edge by being able to compete for business opportunities that WBENC Corporate Members and government agencies provide.

The fact that it was difficult to find all-women law firms led me to wonder why that was so. Why is it that women do not band together to try to combat a male-dominated profession through creating their own law firms? Is creating more all-women law firms the appropriate way to break through the glass ceiling? I believe that great change in areas such as gender equality does not occur through separation. Ideally, progress requires a partnership between men and women to change the status quo. Separation through the creation of all-women law firms may alienate men, and thus give more power to the men who already dominate the legal profession. According to statistics from the American Bar Association, women still comprise only 33% of legal professionals in the United States.

Maybe, then, having certified women-owned law firms is how women should assert and create power in the legal profession. Creating a culture through certification where women-owned law firms garner respect and draw in clients can occur while these law firms maintain partnerships with sympathetic men who support women advancing in the field. However, one problem with the WBENC certification is the implication that without certification women owned businesses cannot compete for certain business. Such an implication undercuts professional women's agency. Maybe instead the implication is that there is gender bias in our society that has little to do with women's actual agency and thus women should have more opportunities to combat that bias.

While I believe working in all-women law firm could be beneficial for a work-life balance, some all-women law firms may generate or affirm certain female stereotypes. In 2010, an all-female law firm in Dallas, Texas decided to hire its first male associate. While the associate mentioned that the work was the same anywhere else, he also stated that the atmosphere was more "laidback," the decor nicer, and the lack of a March Madness pool meant he did not have to worry about being last in the pool. Instead of genuinely touting the law firm as the same as any other, the article and the associate highlighted the stereotyped differences of an all-women law firm that some may perceive as negative.

According to Catalyst, over 51% of women practicing law are in private practice. In addition, according to the ABA's Lawyer's Demographic Table 2012, found here, solo practitioners comprise the largest percentage of attorneys in private practice. Following these statistics, probably the most common all-women law firm is the solo practitioner.  While solos can achieve WBENC certification, why would they need to when they can have practices with names like Women's Law Firm, or my favorite Wild Woman Law Practice? Maybe solo is the way to go. In solo practices women can assert their agency and independence while not alienating men because these women are merely participating in the most popular form of legal practice.

In my next post I plan to address the meanings and consequences of attorneys catering to women clients or serving women clients exclusively. Until then, I would be interested to hear what others think about all-female law firms.