Is it a Man's World? (really long post)

I was talking to the Chapter 13 Trustee in our area on the phone the other day and he said something about the issue of gender in the local bankruptcy practice. He thinks its a really big deal that needs to be studied and addressed by the bar. He said, "Women don't practice bankruptcy -- or they don't stay in it." He noted that two women at my firm who once practiced bankruptcy have stopped. We counted together the women attorneys we know who regularly prctice. It is pretty small.

My response was to kind of shrug and say "So what?" Why does this matter? Do we care because we care about women lawyers and want to make sure they feel that all career options are open to them? Or do we care because without women lawyers the clients aren't as well served?

The trustee thinks having more women in the room is good for the bankruptcy system as a whole. For individual consumer bankruptcy, the perception of the system being fair and reasonable and unbiased is probably more likely if some of the players are women. In other words, if a woman's bankruptcy tanks and everyone involved was a man, she may going away feeling like the deck was stacked against her, like she wasn't heard, etc. Whereas if a woman's bankruptcy tanks and the judge was a woman or some of the lawyers were women, she'll still be bummed but will at least feel like the outcome wasn't because of a systemic hostility to her and her circumstances. When I think about individual consumers, I've counselled three women through bankruptcy and I think they trusted me more because I was a woman. I felt like my example, as a woman who knows the system and doesn't get bullied or overwhelmed by it, was more powerful, and my relationships with the clients were warmer and more influential, than that of a male lawyer.

But I don't do much consumer bankruptcy and I'm most interested professionally in business negotiations where it seems like most everyone in and out of bankruptcy is a man. The trustee talked about women-owned businesses, and speculated about whether women business owners would like to have someone involved in their case who doesn't continue negotiations at the urinals. He noted that in many companies middle and upper management is mostly women, but the top dogs are still mostly men. This seems true, but again I sort of say, "so what?" I'm not sure I see it as an inherent problem with the system.

I don't know where I come down on all this. I've never felt particularly isolated because I'm a woman. I've sometimes been the only woman in the room but rarely have I felt bummed out by that, or mistreated. At the same time, I'm professionally in a place where I'm often the least experienced person in the room too. So my identity as the only chick coincides with my identity as the young and friendly apprentice, no threat to anyone, not afraid to say, "This might be a stupid question but..." As I progress into more demanding and sophisticated roles I'll be playing a little different part and I sure as heck don't want anyone treating me differently because I'm a woman. I don't expect anything overt in this area, but it may be that up to a certain point I just won't be perceived as having the same kind of authority as I would if I were a man.

And when I got all fired up and interested in business I must say my lack of fluency in the world of sports and sports analogies began to feel like a zone of ignorance that mattered. Boys grow up and realize that they have a social expectation to be tuned in to sports. Many men decide to ignore it, and that's okay, but girls don't really get the chance to think about it -- my off-the-cuff made up guesstimate is that the same percentage of girls affirmatively choose to educate themselves and participate in sports fan-dom as men affirmatively choose to ignore it completely. In other words, sports fluency is opt-out for men and opt-in for women. There's nothing oppressive about this but the language of business is PEPPERED with sports analogies and metaphors and the whole ridiculous practice of sports commentators to recite statistics and percentages and historical precedents (e.g. "The Broncos have never missed a field goal in the third quarter when playing away from home in a game in which they'd scored more than twenty points") is great training for business talk, and the sports-ignorant have to play a lot of catch up. And I've definitely felt like the outsider at a table when everyone's talking about a game and I don't really even know what sport they're talking about, let alone who "we" are rooting for. I can talk business but I can't talk golf or baseball and I do feel gawky and stupid when others assume we're all in some kind of club together where this is what we all care about.

(Last year I decided I wanted to try out being a fan and began following UNC in college basketball. Basketball does not appear nearly as frequently as football and baseball, or even golf, in business parlance, it seems to me, so this wasn't an opportunistic decision, really. I just picked it because a couple friends are big fans, and because I've always loved watching basketball -- I think it's very graceful. It's pretty clear how to play and what the rules are and what's happening. And you can always see the ball and who has it. And you can see everyone at once, and the ball, so you can see plays go down even while concentrating on the moves of individual players. And there's not much standing around. And the college fans are fantastic and everyone cares so much -- it's great fun.)

The other time I note my gender and feel strange is in social situations with the wives of professional colleagues. A lot of business professionals have wives who aren't in business. And often the women talk to each other and the men talk to each other at cocktail parties, etc. And I find myself with more to say to the men, but don't want to ignore the women. Nor do I want to end up grouped (by the men) into the category of social companion rather than business contact, when I'm clumped with the women talking about gardening or something. This wasn't something I figured out how to navigate when I was at the venture capital firm, and hasn't really come up at my law firm (which has lots of women, some with stay-at-home dads who they support), but in life it is something I think I need to learn to do more gracefully.

My personal experience as a serious sailboat racer from a young age has made me very comfortable and plenty assertive in a world dominated by men. And dominated, generally, by affluent men with power in the business world. Ever since I was 13 or so I would jump on boats owned by these men for races, and I knew how to make myself useful and eventually was answering questions or disagreeing with tactical decisions or showing someone how to do something a better way. So I got socially comfortable with men who were older and more powerful than me but equals in sailing, or even people I could teach. And that ease and approach just continued out in the world. I think this kind of experience isn't one that most girls have. So their experiences with men who run businesses (or law firms) is either sexual interactions (not a great model for professional relationships) or heirarchical boss-employee relationships. I think it's probably hard to use either one of those as a stepping stone to equality in a professional relationship, and I feel lucky to have had sailboats as a shared interest that gave me the experience of being a peer to people I might otherwise have wondered how to talk to. (The post-race socializing with onshore girlfriends and wives, impeccably groomed and not knowing a thing about sailing while I was salty and wanted to talk about mark roundings, was a precursor to the businessman's wife problem that arose later).

Comments

[TPB, Esq.]

I think this sort of difficulty, your inability to find women that are willing to talk about "mark roundings" is reflective of the problem created by a lack of women in a field of law. In family law, we have to have male and female attorneys because a lot of men refuse to have "weak" female attorneys and a lot of women refuse to deal with "overbearing" male attorneys (mind you, I think my female mentors are more pushy and more overbearing than I, and they think I rely too heavily on negotiation and settlement).

I deal with a lot of bankruptcy attorneys down here. I've never noticed that field as male dominated. I noticed that about PI and criminal defense, but not bankruptcy. It might be a regional thing, though.

[Richard Ames]

The trustee you spoke to sounds like a nut. I’m sorry, but really! We’re talking bankruptcy services here, not gynecology. What on earth could be farther removed from the influences of sex than the world of automatic stays and reaffirmation agreements? If a business woman told me she chose her legal counsel, even partially, based upon gender, I would see her as a rather pathetic individual in apparent need of a sorority sister more than a serious business partner.

The old guard men are getting old, retiring, dying in droves. I don’t see condescending behavior toward women among my male contemporaries anymore than they are likely to be condescending to me or any other man I know. Women in the profession who think they aren’t being “taken seriously” would do well for themselves if they stopped dramatizing “women’s roles” in the law, and simply got on with practicing it.

[Courtney]

We-ell, I choose my professionals, including my lawyers, at least partially based upon gender because the choice is not just about my personal comfort level, but also about how well my chosen professionals are going to perform within local society. I'm not a raving feminazi, and neither am I a super-Republican, but simply practical. I'm not going to buck the system to my detriment, because it's rarely just me riding on the outcome.

This is not always to say that I choose women over men, or vice versa, but simply that gender is indeed one of those factors that I consider. I like female gynecologists, and male marital therapists, and female personal therapists, and male litigators and female family lawyers ... yaddi yaddi yaddi ...

[lawyerchik1]

What a nice column! I work for a commercial and business litigation firm that deals with consumer issues (including bankruptcy law), and I haven't seen any of the gender issues come up in practice. I do creditor litigation myself, and it hasn't seemed to matter much professionally whether I am a woman or not. I have noticed the social awkwardness, though - BIG time! I've found some exceptions, but for the most part, the wives of the junior equity partners (not so much the associates or the senior partners, but the junior partners) don't know how to talk to us female associates. It's weird - of course, there are men who have nothing to do with the legal profession who have a hard time talking to women lawyers, too, but that's their own insecurities, right? :) Nice writing, though!! Glad I stopped by!!

[Keith]

It has been what centuries since we are getting into discussions over gender and all that. All we conclude in the end does start a new thread yet again. So why discussing such issues in the first place?