Prove You’re A (Good) Lawyer! The Double Whammy of Being A Minority Lady Lawyer

The game is rigged, and it’s pretty clear against whom it is rigged. And minority women know the score.

(Image via Getty)

We’re back again.   This time, based on popular demand, we are back to discuss the unique challenges that women of color face in the legal profession.  And by challenges we mean the double-whammy of racial and gender bias.

Let’s start with the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) 2018 report on diversity in U.S. law firms to line up some depressing figures:

  • 51.42 percent of summer associates are women; 45.91 percent of associates are women; and only 23.36 percent of partners are women.
  • 35.04 percent of summer associates are racial/ethnic minorities; 24.22 percent of associates are racial/ethnic minorities; and only 9.13 percent of partners are racial/ethnic minorities.
  • 20.83 percent of summer associates are minority women; 13.52 percent of associates are minority women; and only 3.19 percent of partners.

“[A]t just 3.19 percent of partners in 2018, minority women continue to be the most dramatically underrepresented group at the partnership level, a pattern that holds across all firm sizes and most jurisdictions.”

It is no wonder that minority women face higher barriers.  They are not seen in the profession.  The barriers to entry set up a self-fulfilling prophecy and a false meritocracy.  Minority women can’t get their foot in the door.  And even if they do, someone is going to slam that door against them (maybe even repeatedly).

To borrow from our last co-written column: “The reason that women don’t seem to ‘conform’ to what a lawyer ‘looks like’ is because the stereotype of a lawyer is a man.”  We should have added the term “white” to the term “man.”

A recent ABA Report “You Can’t Change What You Can’t See: Interrupting Racial and Gender Bias In the Legal Profession,” discusses some of the barriers minority women face to a greater degree than any other group.  To get the same recognition as their white male peers, minority men and women and white women “reported that they have to go ‘above and beyond’ to get the same recognition and respect as their colleagues.”   Minority women are more likely to be mistaken for janitors “at a level 50 percentage points higher than white men.”  Women of all races reported doing more administrative tasks than their male colleagues.  Gender and race also appear to affect the type and quality of work lawyers receive, depriving minority women of opportunities to interact with clients and develop practical skills (and meet their required billable hours).

These experiences confirm what the data suggests:  Substantial barriers prevent minority women from garnering top slots in the legal profession.  We’d call it a glass ceiling, but there is more than one barrier and those barriers are hardly invisible.

Part of the problem is the perception of what needs to change in the legal profession to deal with these barriers.  Not surprisingly, the typical answers require the minority lady lawyer to either change herself or to bear the burden of effectuating actual change.  For example, “[t]he most commonly used training materials and leadership courses focused on how individual lawyers could overcome barriers in the workplace . . . rather than on removing those barriers,” writes the New York Times.  And when it comes to removing those barriers, another ABA study notes that “many firms overburden women of color through diversity committee assignments, recruiting assignments and other such efforts that marginalize the diversity efforts and place women of color in conflicting roles that compete for limited time.”

To a minority lady lawyer candidate, the whole process might sound like this: Please prove to us that you are worthy of employment by overcoming these barriers.  We definitely won’t change them and might exacerbate them by relying significantly on referrals and hiring pools lacking diversity.  Once you do overcome them, well, you might have to work twice as hard to get exactly where your white male peer stands.  We will reward that with lower pay, but we’re still going to question whether you really do belong by asking you to prove it again.  Then you get to encounter biased performance evaluations with vague criteria where you will need to defend yourself against unsupported critiques.  And once you do all that, we can claim that we aren’t biased because, look, you’re here!

It’s a neat trick.  Except:  Minority women aren’t in the legal profession, to any great degree.  And that’s largely because of the double whammy they suffer of racism and sexism.  And double whammy isn’t accurate because the negative effects of race and gender don’t just add up.  The effects of intersectionality are often compounded.  There’s a reason minority lady lawyers are even harder to find than just lady lawyers or minority lawyers alone.

It might be convenient to just blame the firms for this problem.  Sure, they have barriers that need to change, even those firms that acknowledge these issues exist.  For example, firms that have diversity programs might treat those associates as tokens, stigmatizing them and constantly reminding others that the associate is “different” and was hired through a different process.

But other institutions also have a way of entrenching the familiar, no matter how sexist and racist. It’s not like law schools have been great about assuring diversity of the legal profession by accepting droves of minority women.   The barriers facing minority women before they even take the LSAT, combined with the law school singular quest to assure U.S. News Rankings, combines to block all but a small number of minority women from entering law schools.  Institutional bias trickles down, and flows upward.  The game is rigged, and it’s pretty clear against whom it is rigged. And minority women know the score.  All they have to do is look at the faculty bios, law firm bios, and notice who isn’t there to any great degree.  As the ABA’s most recent report on this issue notes in its title, “You can’t change what you can’t see.”  Until we start seeing more minority women in law schools (as students and professors), as summer associates, as associates, and as partners, it will be difficult to change what we frequently fail to see:  Time and time again minority women have to prove their worth when their peers get by on the same — or worse — credentials.  And every time they are asked to prove their worth again, minority women have to fight harder to stay in a profession that should value their voices.


LadyLawyerDiaries (Twitter: @LadyLawyerDiary) is a forum run by lady lawyers for lady lawyers and their male allies. The handle and corresponding hashtag (#LadyLawyerDiaries) celebrates and promotes women in the law while shining a spotlight on their successes and war stories. Please follow them on Twitter and lend your voice to the conversation. 

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings hereHe is way funnier on social media, he claims. Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.