From the Editor

By Peter Allen
     
      Last spring, Heller Ehrman's Gender Diversity Committee sponsored a wide-ranging roundtable in San Francisco on the topic of women disappearing from the upper tiers of management in law, finance, and commerce. With its Opt-In Project?the name is a play on the supposed trend of highly educated women opting out of the workplace?the firm helped kick-start a soul-searching inquiry among women in law firms, corporations, government, and academia about nature and nurture?or the lack of it?at work. One of those attending was Associate Editor Malaika Costello-Dougherty, who wrote this month's cover story ("We're Outta Here," page 20). Intrigued by what she heard, Costello-Dougherty began reporting on what turned out to be a comprehensive look at the issue. She read numerous studies, talked to experts, and interviewed approximately 40 lawyers about the tendency of women to eventually leave large law firms in greater numbers than their male counterparts. (They may represent almost half of any new associate class, but nationally they make up only about 17 percent of the partnerships. And because it costs a law firm an estimated $300,000 to lose an associate, the loss of these women is costly, even with a business model based on attrition.)
      Reporting on the disaffected is always a delicate task. At a second Opt-In meeting, Costello-Dougherty says, one senior attorney asked: "Is that reporter girl going to take notes?" Because of the sensitive nature of the topic, some lawyers would talk only on background?without being named or quoted. Some didn't want to reveal which law firms they had once worked for. Costello-Dougherty agreed to forgo names in some cases, because she was reporting on a significant trend, and also because she felt the names of firms were less important than the thoughts her sources expressed.
      In the end, the 30-year-old Costello-Dougherty concluded that part of the reason for the women's disappearance is a huge gap?a missed connection?between younger and older generations of female attorneys. "I started my research with the assumption that women were threatened by each other," she says. "However, no one said this among the female lawyers I interviewed. And both older and younger lawyers spoke more about not having time, about the isolation of law firm life, and about being shy. I think there's a lot of hard-earned knowledge that gets lost in those missed connections."
     

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