Running Our Own Gauntlets

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Kate McKune to our pages.

A dear friend from law school was in town recently for work, and we had one of those evenings where you stay up too late talking because you just don’t see each other enough.  We sat in my car outside her hotel for an extra hour while I was supposed to be dropping her off, talking about our work, our families, our aging parents, and our health.

Seventeen years (!!) out of a top 10 law school, we have really different lives.  She is a kick-ass litigation partner in a Biglaw firm in New York who lives between two cities, travels nationally to try mass tort cases, and has three dogs and a very good college basketball team she adores.  After a clerkship and a short Biglaw stint in D.C., I spent a dozen years in private practice at a litigation boutique in a mid-size city. I have been general counsel at a regional financial institution for the last two years. My husband and I have three kids, now 6-13, who are currently engaged in loads of activities and a serious lobbying effort to add just one dog (“Please!?!”) to our household.

These differences bear out broadly in our group of female law school friends too.  Almost all are still working as lawyers, but they are Am Law 50 practice group chairs and big industry power players, small company GCs and counsel in-house and outside, with FBI agents in between.  We are in big cities and smaller cities. Some are married; some are not.  Some are childless; some are not. Some have scaled back their work at times or permanently; some have not.

But as my friend and I talked that night, in spite of the differences in our day-to-day work and the arcs of our careers, and in spite of the privileges we admittedly enjoy because we are straight and white, we kept coming back to the way gender has mattered in our careers and in this group of friends.  She said, “We have really had to run our own gauntlets, haven’t we?”

We have made choice after choice in our company to ensure we were “beyond reproach” and no one could claim that our children affected our work, only to have a less-experienced male counterpart promoted above us. We have had to invest precious hours to serve on the firm comp committee because we see repeatedly that our female colleagues are cut out of fair compensation.  We have had a law firm partner complain straight-faced that we did not ask him before we had another baby.  We have had to endure a male colleague who undercuts and competes against us, even within the firm, and whose retaliation we have to take into account.  We have stood while a colleague told a young male associate we were “too nice” to make a certain argument.  We have seen the motherhood penalty play out many ways, including incremental marginalization in our organizations as opportunities went elsewhere.  And these are just a few examples among this group of women.

Over and over in the time since law school, I have considered the advice I would give a group of third-year female law students, thinking really about the advice I wish someone could have given me then.  I fantasize taking these women friends with me to talk about our experiences, because as wide-ranging as the career and life paths of my female friends from law school have been, there are these striking common threads.

Yes, I would tell those younger women that what they want may change over time.  What looks, from the vantage point of your 3L year, like the next brass ring, the next in an impressive string of achievements, will evolve as life does — as personal relationships change, as parents age, as you decide whether to be a parent yourself, as career twists and turns come and go.

And yes, I would tell them there are more paths than you can imagine to a fulfilling career and life.  I would ask them to be open to the possibilities of opportunities they did not imagine and to pick what is right for each of them.

But I also would tell them that gender is going to matter.  You don’t want it to, and I am sorry that it does, but it is better to come to terms with it early.  Gender is a factor when you don’t want it to be, and I can only imagine the complexity when it is layered with race and/or sexual orientation.  We can implore those younger women not to spend years beating themselves up or wondering “Is it just me?”  It is not.

Maybe, if they can listen to me, to my friends, tell our stories of the pernicious and pervasive ways it has mattered for us, they can avoid some of the struggles we have had.  Maybe they can keep from internalizing criticism that is really about broken systems that are still not working for women in law.  Maybe they can help us keep trying to change the systems.

Maybe they can hear the recommendation to find an honest mentor a few years older who will share her perspective, because we all have these stories.  People will tell you things have changed — just not as much as we would have hoped.  Let’s get to it.  These women and I are still here, in these workplaces, trying to be part of the solutions, and thankfully, supporting one another along the way.

Earlier: Mothers At Law: Achieving Meaningful Success In The Legal Profession

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Kate McKune is General Counsel at Park Community Credit Union in Louisville, Kentucky. She grew up in central Kentucky and received her B.A. from Wake Forest University and her J.D. from the University of Virginia. She clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and was in private practice for 14 years before joining the Credit Union. Kate currently volunteers with the Legal Aid Society, the Kentucky Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel, and the United Way of Kentucky. She and her husband have three children and, currently, still no dog.