Moving Law Practice Forward For Women Of Color
The legal industry continues to make strides in the advancement and retention of women – but the pandemic has highlighted the fact that there’s still much work to be done, particularly for women of color.
The legal industry continues to make strides in the advancement and retention of women – but the pandemic has highlighted the fact that there’s still much work to be done, particularly for women of color.
The idea that women of color face multiple disadvantages at firms and other workplaces is nothing new. A groundbreaking 2006 report by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms, tackled the intersecting racial and gender biases these professionals face while managing their careers. “I do think there has been some progress made” since the report’s publication, says Paulette Brown of Locke Lord LLP, one of its co-authors. “But there still remains an issue of visibility.”
Brown, the first woman of color to lead the ABA, explains that being “visible” has multiple meanings: “It’s about people acknowledging that women of color are present in the room, that they belong there, and not asking again and again for their bona fides. It’s overcoming the ‘prove it again’ effect we see over and over.”
The pandemic has exacerbated disparities between women of color and others at law firms in tangible ways, including around visibility. Getting significant matters to handle – and getting credit for originating work – were already more difficult for women of color before COVID-19, and the remote environment hasn’t helped, says Roberta Liebenberg, senior partner at Fine, Kaplan and Black and co-author of the recent ABA Report Practicing Law in the Pandemic and Moving Forward, with Stephanie Scharf of Scharf Banks Marmor LLC. “Our studies have found that it is much more difficult for women of color to speak up and be recognized in Zoom meetings,” Liebenberg says. “And, if you thought you were invisible before, the remote workplace is certainly not going to help with the sort of informal networking that happens at firms throughout the day.”
Another study, Left Out and Left Behind (authored by Brown with Eileen Letts and Destiny Peery), showed that women of color take on more extended family obligations than other groups. Beyond childcare, these women may also be taking care of older family members in multigenerational homes and tend to rely less on outside hired help to ease the burden. All of this continues to create stress during the pandemic, as Liebenberg and Scharf confirmed in the recent survey. “We know from Practicing Law in the Pandemic and Moving Forward that women, and especially women with children, have been experiencing extreme stress, anxiety and depression, partially brought on by the fact that legal organizations didn’t reduce billable hours while at the same time they had to take care of parents or children or other relatives,” Liebenberg adds.
It is apparent that these pressures can only be relieved by broad structural change. That means re-thinking long-held ways of doing business, including how performance is evaluated. “One of the issues with structural bias is that leaders don’t actually see it,” Liebenberg says. “We know from decades of research that organizations like law firms that believe they’re meritocracies are actually more susceptible to bias, because they truly believe that you’re going to advance and succeed on merit alone. And they do not recognize the implicit biases and burdens that impact women and women attorneys of color on an everyday basis.” This leads to talented attorneys “voting with their feet” and choosing to leave, she adds.
With greater attention paid to diversity, equity, and inclusion than ever before, these experts agree that now is a “tipping point” for law firms. “Thinking long-term is a business imperative,” says Scharf. “Each year, law firms lose talent because they are not advancing lawyers of color and women at the same rates as those groups exist – so 10 years from now, if a law firm maintains the same rate of women of color at senior levels, they will be out of sync with what the population looks like and with their clients.” Clients will take note of this, too, and take their business elsewhere, she adds.
Scharf and Liebenberg say they plan to continue their research into the effects – and opportunities – the new way of working has brought to the legal profession, particularly the impact on women and women of color. Liebenberg concludes: “What I hope to see is that we take what we’ve learned and the flexibility that we’ve adopted during the pandemic, and that we don’t revert to the status quo, but we actually do try to think outside of the box and do something different – because the old way is not working.”
Learn more from these and other leading women in the law about how to advance to leadership roles at Practising Law Institute’s Women Lawyers in Leadership 2021 program, chaired by Jayne A. Goldstein, Miller Shah LLP, taking place via webcast on September 23 (and available on-demand after that).
