divine angst

For the last couple of days, I’ve been ruminating on the New York Times article on women in the law. I wanted to write something substantive about it, but really couldn’t get past my first impression–the article leaves me feeling vaguely sad. The fact that my career will likely be more difficult than my male peers’ is frustrating, and is only made worse because I know that, in large part, that difficulty will arise out of my/our desire to raise a family. I’m not oblivious to the fact that I won’t be able to be a stay at home mom–but that’s OK, because I’ve never wanted that. Furthermore, having been raised by a single mom who worked and went to school, I know that kids still turn out OK even when their parents aren’t always around.

But still the article makes me sad. First, it approaches the career of a woman in law as one with a specific trajectory–into partnership. Sure, the author interviewed women who have done different things, but the general tenor of the article suggested that, by leaving the partnership track, those women were somehow failing. Or, that, because many women don’t make it to partner, the “system” has failed them.

And maybe that’s where the sadness comes from for me. Because while I know that law firms have done things the way they’ve done them for many, many decades, I don’t necessarily think the law firm system–overworked associate toiling towards partnership–is the best one. The article, for instance, touches on the problems with billable hours:

Over the last two decades, as law firms have devoted themselves more keenly to the bottom line, depression and dissatisfaction rates among both female and male lawyers has grown, analysts say; many lawyers of both genders have found their schedules and the nature of their work to be dispiriting.

And that’s a great observation, even if it’s not breaking news to me or any of my classmates. The problem is that the author doesn’t really impugn the actual concept of the billable hour. Instead, it focuses on firms that use other factors when making compensation decisions: “Compensation is also based on a number of other factors, including leadership and business development activities, among which billable hours are just one component.”

What I wanted the author to get to–and what he very carefully avoided getting at–is that billable hours are inherently NOT family-friendly. What I’m saying is not new stuff, either–people like Matt Homann have written more and better about the problems with billable hours. I just want to point out that, from a family standpoint, working in a system that rewards more tasks, done more discretely does not reward the innovative or efficient employee. And the one thing that all the working moms I know have in common is a passion for doing more, more efficiently.

Further, the article didn’t address any of the other inherent shortcomings in the law firm system. It didn’t shine a spotlight into the perhaps outdated methods law firms use. One woman interviewed said,

“We have a long way to go. It’s my dream that more women will stick it out in the law until they get to the fun part, and it just breaks my heart to see them giving up the dream.”

But why does any young lawyer have to “stick it out”? Why isn’t it fun from the beginning? The irony is pretty thick here–gosh, it’s pretty bad that women don’t stick it out, when, after all, the way we treat our employees means they won’t have any fun for the first several years. The article acknowledges the mentoring problems in law firms without pointing out that any career which requires three years of (expensive) graduate education should perhaps offer more for the junior associate than several years of expected drudgery before the job gets “fun.” So, sure, shucks, I’m sorry too that career paths at law firms for women, with or without families, are so difficult or are so uncertain. And gee, I’m sorry that, in the hard-bitten law firm world, women who don’t learn to say “I want” don’t go places. But maybe, you know, the problem is really the business model that rewards only a single kind of aggressiveness and farms out its dullest tasks to the most junior employees–employees who, particularly if they are women and mothers, will rarely hesitate to walk away from it all.

So the article made me sad. Because it didn’t say anything I hadn’t already thought about, it just put some hard facts on paper. It seemed to accept that the law firm environment is a fait accompli, perhaps changeable in some ways (considering, for instance, an associate’s ability to work in a team along with her total billable hours when handing out bonuses), but not substantially. And if we, meaning female lawyers and law students, accept that, then it really won’t be substantially changeable. Nor will it be if the problem is seen as confined to women. The last line of the article is really the most true, even if it is clichéd:

“I think diversity is a beneficial thing in an organization,” she adds. “Without it, you have a loss of different points of view.”

Men, women, law firms, everyone (the WORLD) suffers when women are driven out of the workplace. I bet a lot of women thought that fundamental problem had been solved decades ago. Well, not in law firms. How much longer will take?