sexism after law school- still here, still sucks

The universal truth to rebalance your universe: when the patriarchy gets you down, surround yourself with women. Aggressively purchase coquettish doo-dads, host a gathering, hold a baby, rage in a socially acceptable way that won't affect future employability, grow the whisper network, close down the cheap-but-not-too-suspiciously-cheap sushi place, and run acquaintances' new fiances through MyCase. Did we pass the E.R.A? No, but we laughed at small men, and that's good enough for a weeknight.

Let's just say, the patriarchy, as of late, has indeed been getting me down. So I've been pouring myself back in the friendships and relationships that give me life, especially those who kept me going in this loveless, thankless profession of law, and goshdarnit, you know what I've been finding? The patriarchy has indeed, been getting all of us down.

I've been a "real lawyer" for a hot second now and have the beginnings of some disappointing data: if it was hard for a woman in law school, it's harder for a woman in law. And I fear it's just the beginning of a trend that will prove to be tried and true.

According to the American Bar Association, steadfastly since 2016, the majority of law students are women. The overall number of male students has been declining. The majority of full-time faculty professors at ABA-accredited law schools are or imminently will be women. To put this in perspective, in 1970, women made up 9% of law students. This is no small feat and definitely something to cheer.

Soooo does that means we've reached parity in the labor force? Heehee, that's cute, girlie.

In 2023, only 23% of law firm partners were women. Lawyers of color are just 23% of the overall amount of lawyers (a figure that only doubled in the last decade). 4.6% of lawyers identify as LGBTQ+ (compared to overall figure of 1 in 10 Americans). In 2024, only 33% of federal judges were women. State courts also average 33% women judges. Annndddd of course, only 5% of all Supreme Court judges were women.

We're also seeing states buck against the ABA accreditation for law schools, meaning that unaccredited law schools who, let's say, do not want the law to represent the diversity of the general populace, are finding federal support, forever affecting the legal field until it's too late.

If the argument is that women are still growing their careers and expertise, and we'll see higher and higher numbers of women getting appointed to the bench, becoming partner, and getting positions of power in the law in their later years - I just think this is naive and unrealistic. 1992 was declared the Year of the Woman, because we went from 2 female senators to......6. We right now have 26, or about 25%. Why aren't we at parity, reflecting the 50.5% of American public that are women, if the Year of the Woman was from before I was born?

Childrearing

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, damned if you emasculate your partner by having him stay at home because he has the lower-paying job, damned if you do it on your own, damned childcare prices, damn you for being able to afford childcare when it is some other woman who can't afford to stay with her own kids watching yours, damn it when you get pregnant and inform your boss so you get less work out of retaliation and your career never picks up the same when you come back from maternity leave, damn your male colleague who is praised for working through his measly two weeks' paternity leave, damn your IVF prices when you try to work pregnancy around your career, and damn you for feeling a pang of anger after choosing childlessness and watching the mothers disappear from the field that you all worked so hard for to be passed over by their far-less-capable male colleagues whose only virtue seemed to be off-loading their labor onto their wives and partners.

((And it should go without saying, men should have much, much better paternity leave and many men struggle with the same issue of being a present parent in a capitalist hellscape, but the fact that I feel like I need to make space for this over the fact that women face this a hundredfold is just annoying, right????))

When I did my Character and Fitness interview for the Bar, for what should have been a landmark accomplishment that signaled how close I was to entering the profession, it was derailed into a Nostradamus-like nightmare. My interview was up, up, up high in a swanky downtown corporate law office by a renown female partner. She asked me some basic questions and then latched on to my personal feminist ideologically. She didn't necessarily tell me to keep it quiet, just to be realistic that I can use it in my practice, but kiss it goodbye in my personal life. It was like a play. A spotlight landed on her as she ruminated out loud about her upcoming retirement. Did she do everything wrong? Should she, could she have gone back and done it all differently? She didn't give enough time to her children and family. She knew of another close female friend -a powerhouse partner- whose children don't speak to her in their adulthood, having a closer bond to the nanny than their own mother. Why didn't they get it right, with all the privilege and all the resources that came as they climbed up? They had money, but not time; intention but not reality. Where would they have ended up if they had stopped climbing? The spotlight disappeared, she shook herself out of her reverie, and shook my hand, wishing me the best as I stepped into my future.

I walked out dazed. The fuck? I wondered if my male friends got the same speech or if they laughed over raunchy drinking stories and exchanged business cards with their corporate bro interviewer? I appreciated this woman's vulnerability, but her haunting omen- even though I know I won't have children- left me shaken. And now it just leaves me sad. Sad that it was how I started my profession, and sad for her, that at the end of her career, she felt like she had it all and nothing.

On the flipside, at my swearing-in ceremony, two female judges up on the stage got to swear in their children in our class. I hope they felt every anxious doubt and thought they had about parenting and motherhood and career success dissapate in that moment. ((And the ugly, tiny part of me hoped their children felt a sense of need to prove themselves over the inherent nepotism, which I'm still staunchly against but the fact it came from mothers does mollify it a litttttttle bit tbh tbh tbh)).

Sexual harassment/Toxic Workplaces/Discrimination

In 2018, the American Bar Association reported that 1 in 3 female lawyers had experienced sexual harassment in their workplace. ONE IN THREE. ONE in THREE. ONE IN THREE. IS THERE ANYTHING BIGGER THAN BOLD CAPSLOCK??? ((Actually, the figure is a little more, at 35%)). The majority of those who disclosed these experiences to this report said that the behavior never got reported, for fear of retaliation. A report of Ontario female lawyers listed sexual harassment and discrimination as the leading reason why female lawyers quit the practice of law. And yet do we have a stat for how many male lawyers perpetuate sexual harassment or discrimination?

Sexual harassment fucking sucks. It can affect your health- sleeplessness, poor eating, ulcers, an increased risk of substance abuse, anxiety, depression, high risk of heart attack, even in its severest form can manifest in PTSD symptoms. The stress can affect the quality of your work, which can affect your career trajectory and earning potential. It can affect your relationships outside of work. It can affect your relationship with power dynamics in future employment. Needing to leave jobs because of safety can be punitive and expensive. And that's only for those who can leave. Some can't, especially when healthcare, or rent, or career growth is tied to the same place that is discriminating against them.

And for all the lawyers out there, we know that sexual harassment is defined as "severe and pervasive." But what about the microaggressions? The subtle passing over, or speaking over? The toxic workplace that runs through young, bright female attorneys like The Bachelor franchise? At what point did the profession accept it as a price to be paid by the women (especially the young ones) and an entitled perk of the job for male lawyers of a certain age?

I could go on and on about my personal experiences, or the word-of-mouth I've heard just about our relatively tiny local legal community, but as an older female attorney warned me "you want to still work in this town?" I could talk about the place I worked for less than two weeks, where the support staff were all women and all the lawyers were men; and on my first day, an older paralegal told me to dress less pretty and warned me that one of the lawyers peed in bottles in his office. I was asked to gift wrap a present by an attorney and wondered angrily why I had agreed to it, how this fit into my law degree, and if my name was "Brian" if I would be asked to have done it. I was told that in the 80s, this firm paid to have "hot tub" holiday parties and a much-older paralegal told me a partner was infamous for dropping pens on the floor to watch the women pick them up. When I had a male attorney place his hand over mine on a mouse and leaned in far to close over me to read over my work, and I heard how often and comfortable they were with verbal abuse, I refused to work for men like that again. I mean, I could tell you, but of course, this is all purely hypothetical of course.

I could talk about how a friend of mine worked for a male attorney who commented on her beauty and her sex drive during her pregnancy, or another whose male colleague liked to work in the word "t*ts" and "p*ssy" into conversations, or another whose firm all but told her she was good for the optics, like a cardboard cut-out of a woman would be just as helpful for them. I could talk about the friend's friend who left her workplace after sexual assault that she felt she couldn't report. I could talk about the male colleagues who claimed work that wasn't theirs, or sat quiet during "locker room talk" but then professed being uncomfortable weeks after the fact, despite being the only one there who could've spoken up. I could talk about a friend who was encouraged to reach out to an older male colleague who was known to mentor everyone....except her, until she had won a prestigious award, and only then he was able to deign to respond to an email. I could speak about the women aren't in the profession anymore after burning out from toxic workplaces, but men who, I don't know just an example, pled guilty to misdemeanor assault after being charged with felony sexual assault, or I don't know just another example, pled guilty to violent domestic violence who I went against at a protection order case (my client, the survivor, won). If we purged the legal community of these people, our state's infamous attorney shortage would be...even more dire, let's just say.

And it goes without saying, that nonbinary, trans, gay, bisexual lawyers as well as lawyers of color experience this on the daily. I once was sent to a rural county courthouse in Nowheresville, Indiana that everyone told me in a matter-of-fact tone was a famous sundown town "but not as bad anymore." This was around 2022. I get physically sick thinking about that town, and the many, many others in our state that not only do people feel scared to drive through, how do they practice there? How do my colleagues who are naturalized citizens feel in immigration court representing people who were picked up based on the color of their skin? Layers of privilege exist within the practice of law and it must be talked about....even now as the law schools are being threatened not to talk about it.

Existing In This State As A Woman

Did any of our male colleagues lose any federal right and constitutional protection that their fathers had? Did they lose health protections that would have saved their lives, their sanity, their autonomy? Do any of our male colleagues worry in the same way about criminalization over a choice they make for themselves between bleeding out on an operating table, waiting to get to the point of death for their life to be saved over an inviable pregnancy, or surviving? Do any of our male colleagues worry about their suffrage after getting married and taking their wives' name? Do any of our male colleagues worry about proposed changes in family law that would make it nearly impossible to leave a domestic violence relationship and be able to safely remove their children with them? Do any of my male colleagues think about having to move states to one that is friendlier, if not safer for their professions if not for their very lives? Idk, these are just my silly little just-girlie-things thoughts.

---

I want to be wrong. I don't want to be the scary Nostradamus lady to younger generations. I want to believe in progress. I want to be wrong. I know so many friends who feel supported in their workplace, who feel like they can move up, who have wonderful female and male mentors who prioritize their comfort and growth. I know great men who are there for their partners and children, or put their partners' careers before their own. There's now an "If/When/How" group at my old law school, the very one that discouraged a nonpartisan, multidisclipinary seminar that I helped put on to discuss Indiana's abortion ban that resulted in credible safety concerns and death threats against staff who then resigned. Cool! A femininonomenon!

What will the legal landscape look like in ten years? Twenty? What areas of law don't even exist yet that will be flooded with diverse practictioners? Will all my friends still be in the field? Will I? Pink-painted fingers emoji. Pink-painted fingers emoji. Pink-painted fingers emoji.