Reflections on Creating Space: Leadership, Advocacy & Women

This month’s “Creating Space: Law, Advocacy & Women” column on page 14 was submitted by a reader as a response to the column. Thank you, Ms. Wright, for your interest and efforts in responding thoughtfully to the content that our columnists have taken it upon themselves to contribute and for sharing your experience in response to Ms. Huller’s most recent column contribution on salary negotiations.

Your response prompts me to address the column’s mission statement, and to thank you again, dear reader, for advancing an opportunity to present a time and space to put the mission statement forward, albeit somewhat late. I do feel a need to explain why I am late on stating the column’s mission statement for those of you who like to keep an orderly house and to those who do not know me and who do not know that I am a “cart before the horse” person in many cases. As with this column, action happens sometimes before a full plan is in place; that is how it happens when you have too many ideas, too much excitement, passion and — most of all — impatience, and are not afraid of some risk. I am also a “slow burn” person. I needed time to see how the column would play out in the legal community, in my life both personally and professionally, how the professional community at-large would respond, what type of content would be submitted, and to sit with my thoughts on exactly why I felt compelled to endeavor in this way. All this to say that any mission statement originated at the beginning of the column would have been overly idealistic and half-baked, anyway. Now that I’ve percolated, received your feedback, sat with my own thoughts, and contemplated why the issues dis-

Bar Journal cussed in this column really matter to me and why I believe they are relevant to my colleagues, here’s the drip: the LAW column is a tool to combat the attrition of women in the legal profession by engaging women thought leaders in our community to share their wisdom, experiences, and authorship, and to remind our women lawyer readers that they have a community to rely upon when they might otherwise question their belonging to the legal community.

Editor Kristen Swift is a Partner at Weber Gallagher and Immediate Past Chair of the Litigation Section. She can be reached at kswift@wglaw. com. Her full bio is available at www.wglaw.com. All opinions expressed are solely her own.

I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to also address the general concept of a “women’s column” or “women in the law” and what exactly that could mean and what it means in the context of the column. I often hear conflation with many educated people in what they understand to be the issues of gender bias/ gender leadership styles and approaches to accomplishing goals or work. At baseline, it is important to recognize that gender and stereotyping gender expectations rarely align with reality, and this misalignment may cause miscommunications and cognitive dissonance. Sometimes the miscommunications and dissonance occur in a professional setting. Women lawyers face unique challenges that may arise because of a sex- or gender-based stereotype regarding how people assume they will handle work and women are underrepresented in the legal field. Designating this column as a “women’s column” is meant to acknowledge the bias, explicit or implicit, within the legal profession that many women lawyers and professionals have experienced and to promote unity within the profession.