village to tear down the maternal wall successful working mothers Stacy Mogale : Partner, Webber Wentzel Three years ago I ventured back into full-time employment after taking some time off to start a family and further my studies. How hard could it be? I was no stranger to the law firm environment, the long hours, the client demands, the rigours of transactional work. I had done this before, this is what I was trained to do, it was all I knew how to do. In fact, the only thing that had changed, was that I was now a wife and a mother, but my skill set, experience, knowledge, work ethic and perfectionist tendencies remained the same. It would be like riding a bicycle, you never forget how, or so I thought… As a candidate attorney and junior associate, one of the biggest contributors to my growth as an attorney was time. In a profession that regards time as a proxy for commitment, I was able to work six day weeks as the norm (and I dare say that I enjoyed it). I was always available, there was no such thing as “not having capacity” because after all, I only worked a six day week, which meant I always had one more day available to take on one more instruction. In those days, as far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as “the glass ceiling”, gender stereotypes or gender wage gap, much less the maternal wall. I was unable to fathom the notion that I might not succeed in my chosen profession for no other reason than that I carried two X chromosomes. The ignorance of youth? Denial? Or the product of a progressive work environment? Fast forward to six years later and everything and everyone had changed. Suddenly every deadline that a client set seemed unreasonable and impossible. Six hours no longer felt like eight hours, but rather like two. It seemed as though there was never enough time to complete a piece, of work much less perfect it. For some reason the only time that anyone was ever available for meetings was either first thing in the morning, when I was supposed to be doing the school run, or late in the afternoon, when I was supposed to be sitting in traffic headed home. When did the practice of law change and become this untamed beast? I was still the same person, with the same skill set, experience, knowledge, work ethic and perfectionist tendencies that I had before having children, so it certainly was not just me who had changed, was it? In my quest to answer this question, coupled with my desire to find others who shared and could affirm my experience, I have spent the last three years of my life labouring over a dissertation for a master’s degree, titled “The postpartum experience of female attorneys in South African law firms.” I interviewed working mothers from the five largest law firms in
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