Biglaw, Kids, Women's Issues

Biglaw Mommy: Women Of Biglaw, Unite?

When we think about ways to improve the environment for working mothers, maybe we need to start with each other.

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I read a very relevant article recently by a female executive addressing a lot of the same issues I’m dealing with in this column — the entire article was basically a mea culpa for treating mothers in the workplace badly until she herself had a baby and realized that she had been a huge jerk. It’s a good read, and I recommend it. If you don’t feel like taking the time, the gist of it is pre-baby, this woman majorly judged working mothers, assumed they had no time or interest to do a good job at work, and deliberately scheduled 4:30 meetings to make it difficult for them to pick up their kids at daycare and got all judgy when they chose to go home to their kids instead of boozing at happy hour. Then she had a baby and poof! It all became so clear, and now she’s a champion of working moms. But the article really got me thinking, and not in the way I might have expected.

It’s all well and good for this woman to go public and say she was wrong to judge working mothers before she walked in their shoes, and I’m delighted that she’s now championing the cause. I admire that her experience before and after having a baby motivated her to co-found a business venture whose goal is to create a new and more flexible way for mothers to stay in the workforce. It’s precisely that kind of creativity that will help us progress and escape the confines of the traditional, predominantly male-oriented work culture, particularly within the large law firms which are especially guilty of embracing a view of work that can make staying in the profession an impossibility for new mothers.

Yes, it’s all great. But it’s really a shame that this woman couldn’t have just had a little empathy to begin with. She’s doing really admirable work now, but what about all the working mothers who she treated badly before seeing the light? Who knows how many women’s careers she disrupted or even derailed because of her pre-baby views?

Surprisingly (at least to me), some of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about being a mother in the workplace revolve around their treatment by other women, some of whom are working mothers. This is really upsetting, because since beginning this column I’ve also gotten feedback from many people who say one of the single most powerful forces behind their ability to work and be a mom is the presence of other strong women at work, who can serve as mentors and offer support. And while those women don’t have to be mothers in order to mentor, it can be a bonus for a more junior mother who wonders how she can ever possibly make it work. Given how essential it is to have this kind of support network — particularly in the Biglaw environment which is still, by all standards, dominated by men — I’m always surprised to hear stories of working mothers being, well, persecuted by other women.

Sadly, it does happen. I’ve seen my share of it, and I’ve heard many more stories. Some of them are like the woman in the story above: Women without children who have just as little understanding of the demands of motherhood as any man, and who may perceive working mothers, with the many non-work-related demands on their time, as both undedicated and making other women look bad in the workplace. This attitude is unfortunate, but it reminds me of when I was much (much) younger and would hear stories of, say, affirmative action programs in universities and ask my parents why we needed them because I had never seen instances of racism in my life. I didn’t believe we needed affirmative action because from my perspective, racism didn’t exist. Obviously a completely naïve and uneducated view (and one that I’m delighted to say has evolved considerably over the years), but at least it can be explained by my lack of experience and unfamiliarity with the issues.

What I really don’t understand is the working mothers who are complete nightmares. Sometimes, these are the (usually older) women who struggled even more, who were working moms decades ago when there were even more obstacles, and who take an attitude similar to partners that I’ve described before — that “if I suffered through it, you have to suffer too” attitude. The “no one helped me, no one made it easy for me, why should I make it easier for you” attitude. That attitude that makes them crack down even harder on working mothers than anyone else. But more often, they seem to be the hyper-competitive associates and junior partners who view being a working mother as yet another Biglaw race to win, like there’s only room for so many working mothers and they’re determined to come out on top. Rather than offering support to other working moms, they try to out-working-mom them, perceiving them as a threat rather than a support system. And while it doesn’t matter if those moms want to grind away until the wee hours of the morning, racking up their billables, their attitude towards other moms does matter.

Fortunately, those women really do seem to be few and far between. In fact, in response to my column last week querying whether it was possible to start out in Biglaw as a junior mommy, I got a lot of really great emails from women who told me not to be so negative, that it was totally doable with the right attitude and support. And many of those women attribute their success in Biglaw primarily to the amazing mentors they’ve found, other women who successfully navigated Biglaw and motherhood and take newer moms under their wings. I also heard from the women who take on those mentoring roles, and how important they view those roles, and it encourages me.

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And yet, I got an email a while back from my firm’s “Women’s Committee” and I’m pretty sure I deleted it right away. Either that or it got lost immediately in the abyss that is my inbox, never to be seen or heard from again. And that’s not because I don’t care about women’s issues, obviously. It’s because no one seems to take the Women’s Committee seriously. It’s because the most recent lunch event I attended was focused entirely on how to get clients “as a woman in the law,” not about issues the women I know care about. I’m not worried about my ability to get clients as a partner, I’m worried about my ability to juggle my life long enough to actually even think about being a partner. And it’s because a couple of the women who ran the most recent event are that (thankfully rare) breed who are notorious for being absolutely brutal to work with, not supportive mentors.

All of this tells me that when we think about ways to improve the environment for working mothers, maybe we need to start with each other. We need to start on a professional level, meaning that firms need to take their women’s initiatives seriously, and the women at those firms need to take the initiatives seriously.  And we also need to approach it on a personal level, meaning that we as working mothers need to support each other — and in a perfect world, women in general would support each other, babies or no babies. Let’s treat each other as resources and allies, and trust each other. And, I don’t know, hold hands and sing kumbaya. No, seriously — if it helps, why not?

Mommy Dear, Esq. is a senior Biglaw associate in NYC by day and a new mommy by evening, weekend, and 3:30 a.m. She’s currently trying to “have it all,” “lean in,” and sometimes even cook dinner. Mommy Dear, Esq. is very, very tired. You can email her at mommydearesq@gmail.com.

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