Women Lawyers: How To Interrupt Interruptions

How to combat the biases and stereotypes that can hold women back in the workplace.

onSeptember 11, 2017 at 3:15 PMSeptember 11, 2017 at 2:55 PM

Ed. note: This post is by Jeena Cho, a Legal Mindfulness Strategist at Start Here HQ. She is the co-author of The Anxious Lawyer (affiliate link), a book written by lawyers for lawyers that makes mindfulness and meditation accessible and approachable. Jeena offers actionable change strategies for reducing stress and anxiety while increasing productivity, joy, and satisfaction through mindfulness.

Every woman lawyer I know (including myself) has been there — you’re sitting in a room full of other lawyers and a male lawyer persistently interrupts you. The other common scenario is that you suggest an idea, everyone in the room glosses over it, then after a few minutes, a male lawyer comes up with the exact same idea and everyone praises him for his brilliance. Men interrupting women is a well documented and common phenomenon. Sadly, research indicates it even happens at the United States Supreme Court!

I interviewed Andie Kramer on The Resilient Lawyer podcast. She is a partner with McDermott Will & Emery and author of Breaking Through Bias: Communication Techniques for Women to Succeed at Work. Andie talks about how to combat biases and stereotypes that can hold women back in the workplace.

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From Pilot and Above The Law

Jeena: Talk about some of the factors that hold women lawyers back in the workplace.

These stereotypes and the biases that flow from them hold women back because women are either too kind, too sweet, too nice, too soft — which we would refer to as being too communal — or to assert as aggressive, ambitious which is too agentic which is the word that the social scientists use to describe characteristics that are predominantly attributed to man.

And so what we have is a goldilocks dilemma where women are too sweet, too nice, too kind, or perceived as too tough, too hard. Women have this narrow tightrope that men don’t have in advancing in their careers.

Jeena: For women lawyers out there, what are your suggestions for handling interruptions?

Well, you’ve pointed to a very important issue, a problem that women face, because we’re perceived to be less valuable, again, by virtue of the stereotypes that somehow we’re going to be communal and nice and helpful but not the one who’s going to make a decision.

The statistics are something like seven times more frequently than they interrupt men as a general rule. What happens is they don’t even know that they’re interrupting us. They don’t even hear us.

You’re in a meeting and no one seems to be paying attention to you — common situation complaint for women. One technique is to stand up. Go get a glass of water, get a cup of coffee, and then start talking. When you walk back to your chair you don’t sit down. It’s much harder for people to interrupt you if you’re standing and they’re sitting. That’s one technique.

Another technique is men can very easily say “I’m not finished yet,” in a very harsh voice and people back off. If a woman does that then their hair catches fire and they don’t have a clue what to do. So women need to be able to do that in a more — even if it’s offensive — in a more pleasant sort of “Fred, I’m not quite finished yet. You can have the floor when I’m done.”