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Should Women Lawyers Stage Job Action?

After our post yesterday about the MIT Workplace Center report, Women Lawyers and Obstacles to Leadership, reaction continued to come in from around the blogosphere. Among the responses were two somewhat radical ideas for addressing the female partnership problem.

The first came from Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith, Esq. Addressing the inherent conflict between women's roles as mothers and as potential partners, his self-described radical suggestion is to "decouple" a women's prime child-bearing years from her prime partnership-track years. His idea is that firms would allow women to take off from the firm for as long as seven or eight years to start their families. When these women return to the firm, "they would jump right back on the partnership track ladder." He adds:

"Those who return will be highly motivated, and they will also have gained a level of maturity and picked up skills that will be of genuine value to the firm and its clients."

Meanwhile, via Stephen Seckler at Counsel to Counsel comes what is, perhaps, an even more radical suggestion than MacEwen's. Seckler attended Wednesday's Boston reception presenting the MIT report. Later, he received an e-mail from another attendee, Sheila Statlender, a clinical psychologist in Newton, Mass., who sits with Seckler on the Boston Bar Association's Standing Committee on Work/Life Balance. Statlender's e-mail conveyed a number of her "musings" about the report, then concluded with this idea:

"I fantasized about a walk out of female attorneys, hopefully accompanied by their male supporters -- perhaps only an hour or two in length, to protest current conditions and to express support for the ideas/strategies proposed at yesterday's briefing. Or an all day conference, a sort of pre-planned walkout, filled with workshops on getting better assignments, business development, the work-life continuum, ... self-care, etc. -- not held on the weekend, but pointedly during the workday."

Women lawyers of the world, unite? Why not? Imagine the impact if women lawyers throughout the United States walked off their jobs for a single, organized day of workshops and events. Even better, imagine if their male supporters joined them. Would the business of law grind to a halt? You bet it would. Would progress be made? No doubt.

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on May 4, 2007 at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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