Firm Watch
Sep. 30, 2005
Rehashing the Career-Family Split
SAN FRANCISCO - One day in the late 1970s, Marie Fiala gathered with a group of women in a restroom on the 30th floor of a downtown San Francisco office building.
The women were attorneys at Heller Ehrman, one of the city's biggest firms. There was ample space in a conference room for the women to meet, but they had a reason for choosing a less conspicuous location.
They were discussing the sensitive topic of how to craft a maternity leave policy for the firm.
"There wasn't any precedent for somebody who was on track toward becoming a partner figuring out how to have children and continue progressing at work," Fiala said.
The firm adopted the policy without hesitation, and Fiala took advantage of it when her first child was born in 1984 - the same year she made partner.
Now the mother of three, Fiala also heads Heller Ehrman's litigation department.
With this experience, Fiala found herself disheartened last week to learn from the nation's leading newspaper that today's young women at top U.S. colleges are planning to forgo full-time careers to be stay-at-home moms.
The story, published on the front page of The New York Times, has provoked strong criticism from female professionals who have questioned whether it's accurate and what it means for gender equality.
"Everybody is talking about it. Everybody is outraged," said Fiala, although she described herself not as angry, but "saddened."
The article discusses a "changing attitude" among young women - mostly derived from interviews with Yale University undergraduates - and suggests a shift away from an interest in juggling career and family.
Some established women lawyers in California were stung by the suggestion that significant numbers of young women don't believe it's possible to be a good mother and a top-notch professional.
"I find it discouraging that our choices are kind of diminished by this generation far behind us," said Jessica Pers, also a longtime Heller Ehrman partner in San Francisco and mother of two.
"The idea that those choices don't seem like legitimate choices anymore, or that we've somehow made choices that have had our children suffer, is just wrong," said Pers, who graduated from Yale in 1971 as a member of the first undergraduate class that included women.
Other attorneys considered it a non-event that an East Coast newspaper long known as the Great Gray Lady has sounded the death knell of the supermom era.
"It was such a superficial article, I really don't think it's going to have that big an impact," said Patricia Glaser, a partner and co-head of the litigation department at Christensen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser, Weil & Shapiro in Los Angeles.
In the Times article, "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,' reporter Louise Story writes:
"Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children."
Story quotes Yale students and other young women at top colleges implying they don't want to simultaneously take on a high-powered career and motherhood.
One young Ivy League student even questioned whether a child can get a proper upbringing without a stay-at-home mom.
Susan Muck, a litigation partner at Fenwick & West in San Francisco, begs to differ. She has been a full-time working mother since she had her first child 14 years ago.
"I would absolutely object to the view that a parent who works rather than being at home somehow causes a child to suffer any adverse affects," Muck said. "I think my children have enormously benefited by my having dual paths."
The lawyers criticized the Times for what the newspaper did not report.
The role women's partners play in parenting was virtually absent from the 2,189-word article, as was the fact that most women, for economic reasons, must work regardless of whether they want to.
They also questioned Story's research method.
The article was largely based on the responses of "138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year." The interviews found that "roughly 60 percent said that when they had children they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely."
Deborah Rhode, a professor at Stanford Law School and a Yale graduate herself, said the article "hardly" reflects a rigorous study or representative sample.
Nonetheless, Rhode said, the article's findings about young women's expectations are consistent with what research shows - that a large percentage of high achieving women do drop out of the paid labor force, and they do it at a much higher rate than their similarly educated spouses.
"It's one more piece of evidence that traditional gender roles are still very much with us," said Rhode, who chaired the American Bar Association's Commission on Women and the Profession from 2000 to 2002.
But regardless of whether the article accurately portrays a trend, some California attorneys worry that a front-page report in a newspaper with the stature of the Times could stall women's progress and discourage employers and admissions officers from selecting them.
"It reinforces the 1940s and '50s stereotypes of women only being in the educational arena to attract husbands," said Heller's Fiala. "The old joke about women going to college to get their MRS degree is being resurrected."
It's not surprising the article struck a nerve in a profession where women account for 17 percent of partners at the nation's major law firms, even though data shows they make up about half the country's law school graduates and hold 43 percent of associate and senior attorney positions.
There's concern within the legal profession that the uneven numbers are partly because of women leaving the law because it's too difficult to balance work and family life.
"Honestly, I think it points out we've got a long way to go," said Carol Copsey, a Gordon & Rees partner who sits on the board of California Women Lawyers. "We've made changes, but we haven't changed enough."
More work needs to be done in structuring part-time policies and creating more flexibility for families and women returning from maternity leave, Copsey said.
And, certainly, there's the question of the role of the women's partners in raising children.
Wendy Lazerson, an employment partner at Bingham McCutchen in East Palo Alto, said she was struck that the women quoted in the Times seemed to presume - when talking about the importance of parental involvement in child rearing - that mothers have to do it all.
"Why would we assume automatically it's the woman?' Lazerson said. "That's an underlying assumption that is so inherently sexist it's somewhat shocking to me that we've made so little progress,"
Chimene Keitner, an associate at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, pointed out what she considered another presumption.
"Many women do not have the economic option of staying home," said Keitner, a Yale Law School graduate. "The students in the article appeared to assume that their spouse would be able to support them, but this is not necessarily true."
Sarah Angel, a second-year law student at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall, said she and her female classmates discuss "over and over" balancing work and family in their future careers.
A lesson they have been told "is you can't be a super mom and a super lawyer - that there is a choice you have to make," Angel said. "But I refuse to believe that."
Staff Writer
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