I am about to break one of my Working Women Commandments: Thou shalt not judge other working women in public.
But I am invoking the “unless they give the rest of us a bad name” exception.
I do think that women are each other’s biggest critics. So I try hard not to bash other women, unless you’re Catherine Zeta Jones, in which case you’re fair game even though I’m Welsh, too. But I digress.
Anyhow, this week, I had the opportunity to meet someone that I had indirect experience with for a few years now, but had never actually met before. She is a senior partner at one of the biggest firms in the City. I had hoped that meeting her would be inspiring – it’s tough to make partner at the best of times, and I think that being a woman makes it’s extra tough. Actually, that’s not my “thinking” at all. It’s true. While women make up about half of the graduating class in law school, they make up about 15% of law firm partners.
There are a million reasons that folks cite: Women don’t want it enough. They don’t want to put in the hours. They’re not as tough as men. Having kids de facto reduces your billables (dontcha love the random inclusion of Latin for no reason? Very lawyerly of me). And, of course, there are allegations of discrimination. The “old boys network” is very real in the field of law – that part, I know to be true – I am one of a handful of women in the Tax Supper Club (yes, it’s real, I told you before that I was a tax geek) and there is a decided sense of order.
At the end of the day, I don’t know what the real reasons are. I just know that the numbers tell a story.
So, making partner at a big law firm as a woman is hard. And I question (yes, I am saying it out loud) what kinds of sacrifices one makes to do it. Because of the few that I have met, only a handful of them qualify as decent people. As Chris says, think of how crazy you have to be to be a man who makes partner – and then think of how crazy you have to be to be a woman who makes partner. It’s a scary thought.
And I echo this after meeting this particular lawyer.
I will say that her reputatation had preceded her. Despite her “recognition” in the legal world among “those in the know”, those who are really in the know don’t think kindly of her. And this week, I found out why.
I didn’t know what to expect, really. I had filled in for her before at a conference that she backed out of the night before because, as she explained, she didn’t have time to prepare, thus sending the organizers of the conference into a panicked tizzy. Excellent break for me because I met some nice people at the conference and it was one of my first public speaking engagements as an attorney – and I did well.
The next time this woman’s name came up was from an organization that asked me to speak and rewrite a manual which had been “prepared” by her. She literally wrote a bare bones outline and didn’t have time to complete the material. It went to press half finished.
So, you could say that I wasn’t expecting much when I met her. I wasn’t disappointed.
She was late for her speaking engagement. Not because of traffic or a family emergency. She had simply forgotten what time it started and apparently didn’t think enough of the organization to call and confirm.
I introduced myself in the breakroom, and as soon as she has ascertained in her patronizing manner that I wasn’t one of the “important people”, she cut me off and switched topics. And while talking to everyone else in the room, she kept doing that “look.” You know the one. The one where you keep looking around the person you’re talking to just in case there is someone else more important in the room. This went on for half an hour.
During our panel seminar, she felt the need to answer her Blackberry twelve times in two hours. Actually, that’s the minimum – after I started counting. I couldn’t help but notice because it kept buzzing – and she kept answering.
She cut me off again on the panel. Then she ignored my whole speech.
She failed to read my bio and then pretended, later, to be “interested” in where I practiced – after everyone else was gone.
The experience was painful.
But it was worse than painful, really. It was disheartening. This was a woman that I wanted to like. I wanted to find something in her that disproved the notions I had already conjured in my head. I wanted her to be funny and smart, or at least personable. But she wasn’t.
She was a stereotype. She was cold and patronizing. She was discourteous to her fellow attorneys – and even moreso (in my opinion) to her fellow women attorneys. She appeared bland and she dressed even more bland. She was everything that I don’t want to be. And that’s a little disappointing. I was hopeful that I would somehow be inspired by her, not disenchanted. But I really was more than disenchanted. I was disgusted.
I fired off an email to one of my colleagues when I got home, asking her whether she had heard of this woman. Maybe, I thought, I missed the mark. Nope. My colleague sent back a note saying that she interviewed with this woman and she found her to be “humorless” and “patronizing.”
And all of this made me think. What do women have to do or become to make partner, or otherwise achieve typically “male” milestones? Do we have to sacrifice ourselves? And does that mean trading in our human-ness? Or do are folks who achieve these goals inherently like that to begin with?
I was thinking of the women that come to mind when I think of success. One word women. Oprah. Madonna. Martha. And the adjectives that describe these women are not generally flattering.
In today’s society, we do not seem to honor women with success in the same manner as men. Successful men are… well… successful. Sucessful women are bitches.
And what I am trying to make sense of is whether, to be successful as a woman, you have to sacrifice who you are or does the notion of success define who you are to the exclusion of anything else? And is there actually a gender divide? Meaning, do women have to sacrifice more of themselve to achieve the same result? Would Martha be Martha if she were a man?
It’s a troubling question.
I will confess that I think I want to be a success, but I am not really sure what that means. My definition of success, though, is changing every day. I want to be proud of myself, but I also want to be a good person. And that means making myself available as a wife, a mom, a sister, a daughter, a friend… I don’t want people to ever say, well she was a damn good tax lawyer, but what a horrible person.
So I guess that is what I have taken from meeting this woman this week. It’s made me question what I think success means, and what I want from life. But I still don’t have the answers.
I am guessing nobody does. Or there would be just one self help book in the world. For now, I wonder if we all don’t dread success just a little. As George Bernard Shaw once famously said:
I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
