Celebrating Women Lawyers During Women’s History Month

It’s Women’s History Month, and I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about it during the month in the context of women lawyers, which, as you know, is a favorite topic of mine.

While I remember all too well how few women lawyers there were when I started out in dinosaur days (Jimmy Carter had just been elected President) and how much better the landscape looks more than 40 years later, women lawyers in this country still have a long way to go to achieve full gender and income parity, and it won’t be in my lifetime.

I am reading First, Evan Thomas’s detailed and admiring biography of Sandra Day O’Connor and remembering how it wasn’t all that long ago (less than 40 years) that President Reagan fulfilled his campaign promise of putting a woman on the Supreme Court. Justice O’Connor was first, but as we all know now, thankfully not last.

Whether you agree or not with Justice O’Connor’s jurisprudence, she has led the way for other women lawyers (Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan) to join the Supreme Court and for that alone, I think that all women lawyers are forever in her debt.

While I like the idea of “first” (as opposed to “none”), I can’t wait (and it’ll probably be after I’m taking a dirt nap) until “first” is no longer a big deal or any deal at all for women lawyers. Charlotte E. Ray was the first African-American woman lawyer in this country, but after a few discouraging years in practice, she turned to teaching instead. Stories like that are less frequent today, but they’re still out there.

I don’t know if Women’s History Month is celebrated in any other country, but I’m fascinated by the stories of women lawyers overseas, who blazed trails in their countries as women lawyers. So, for example, Cornelia Sorabji was the first woman to graduate from Bombay University, the first woman to study law at Oxford, the first female advocate in India, and the first woman to practice both in India and Britain.

Other examples of “first” women lawyers and judges appear in this article compiled by the Library of Congress. It figuratively spans the globe.  Each vignette is fascinating and worth more than my mention here.

However, as tough and long a road as we still have to go, it’s way tougher for women lawyers in certain countries around the world. For example, in Saudi Arabia, while several thousand women have law degrees, the number of women actually licensed to practice is far, far less.  The article, written three years ago, is a fascinating look at the different world of women lawyers in Saudi Arabia, and the small subset of those who are actually licensed. It’s also a fascinating look at the different cultural issues that women lawyers face there. I don’t know about you, but I would be enormously frustrated if I had the law degree but couldn’t get licensed, probably akin to what people in this country feel after repeated failed attempts to pass whatever state bar they need for licensure here.

Being a human rights lawyer and female in a country that does not value the contributions of women and/or human rights lawyering must be incredibly difficult. Read the story of Nasrin Sotoudeh, a woman and human rights lawyer in Iran. Imagine being sentenced to a total of 38 years in prison and 148 lashes (yes, you read that right) for defending women protesting the country’s mandatory headscarf law. Whatever “benchslap” or sentence a court might hand down here in the States, 148 lashes or even one lash (other than a good tongue lashing) would not be part of the sentencing scheme here.

Amnesty International is circulating a petition protesting Sotoudeh’s sentence. Please sign it. I did. Whatever your personal feelings may be about this NGO, this is a lawyer doing her job and as lawyers we should support her. Shouldn’t we stand up for lawyers doing their jobs in the most difficult of circumstances?  Just imagine if this was any one of us doing what lawyers do and suffering these kinds of consequences for what we are supposed to do. We all say it can’t happen here, but one never knows and I hope we never learn.

Whatever problems we women lawyers have in this country, and I am certainly not diminishing them, they pale beside Sotoudeh’s sentence, who is being punished for her advocacy.

Women’s History Month reminds us that despite all the progress that women lawyers here have made here in the last 140 years or so, we still have a long way to go and much to do. 2020 marks 100 years since women won the right to vote, really not all that long ago. It took more than 60 years after that before Justice O’Connor became one of The Nine on the Supreme Court.

There still aren’t enough women equity partners in Biglaw. Women lawyers compose 31 percent of general counsel, but they’re paid almost 40 percent (not a typo) less than their male counterparts. I found this report infuriating. When do income and gender parity become realities and not just aspirations? Your guess is as good as mine. Just because Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire’s dance partner (and yes, I know I’m dating myself), could dance backwards in high heels doesn’t mean that we should.

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Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at [email protected].