One of the most common complaints I often heard—and still hear—from female associates are ones about opposing counsel being a jerk. I certainly wrestled with men who were abusive to me, particularly when I was younger.

I am pretty unflappable and don’t flinch easily. But even I have stories. I once had a male lawyer throw a chair at me during a deposition. (Security was called and the deposition ended.) I’ve been called a bitch, a fucking bitch, and every other nasty word spoken to women that I don’t like to print. I’ve been subjected to comments about my body, my clothes, and my hair, and have been asked more times than I can count if it was that time of the month. I once had a guy who would start saying “blah blah blah blah” to drown out my voice every time I tried to lodge an objection in a deposition. I had to get the judge on the phone with the court reporter to make that stop.

In one case I had co-counsel who routinely went on screaming rampages when I advocated strategies different than his. I used to complain about this man to my managing partner. He found my stories amusing until one day he walked into my office while Mr. X was having one of his fits. He took my speakerphone off mute and took Mr. X to task for about 10 minutes and said he was going to report him to the bar. While Mr. X never became a nice person after that, he was more careful about letting loose on me.

I know about the typical advice given to female associates: something akin to Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high.” In fact, a few weeks ago I had a conversation in the LinkedIn comments with a few women attorneys about whether women should maintain the high ground when faced with jerks on the other side. Some women thought that we are be better off turning our responses into teaching moments, or that we could stop the cycle by refusing to engage.

But I don’t think this advice is helpful to women in the trenches. When we’re practicing law sometimes it’s hard enough to get through a tough day. It puts far too much on women to say that we’re also responsible for stopping an abusive situation or contributing to a more peaceful world. While I don’t advocate for returning fire with fire every single time it happens—in fact, you absolutely should not do that—you need to be able to bare your teeth to survive.

Before I talk about why I feel this way, I want to make one thing clear. While I’ve also worked with men who unintentionally said something offensive and later apologized for doing so, that’s not the type of behavior I’m talking about. I’m talking about unambiguously offensive and abusive conduct engaged in by men who aren’t interested in changing the behavior or themselves.

Robert Sutton, the psychology professor at Stanford who wrote The Asshole Survival Guide and The No Asshole Rule, defined asshole as “someone who leave us feeling demeaned, de-energized, disrespected, and/or oppressed.” Assholes don’t respond to teaching moments, and taking on the responsibility of trying to change an asshole is only going to drain you.

Who’s Allowed to Get Angry

One of the reasons I don’t like hearing that professional women should take the high road when verbally attacked by men is that it reinforces the notion that while men are allowed to be angry, women are not allowed to do so—even when their anger is righteous.

Sutton acknowledges that “[s]ometimes you have to speak to the asshole in the only language they understand, and that means you have to get your hands dirty.” But women aren’t allowed to get their hands dirty in the way that men are. Studies show that men who express anger in a professional context are conferred higher status in the workplace than men who express sadness. But both men and women confer lower status on angry female professionals, regardless of their occupational rank. And, while women’s emotional reactions are attributed to internal defects (“She is an angry person” or “She is out of control”), men’s reactions are attributed to external circumstances (“She made him angry” or “He’s under stress”).

The same judgments apply to women lawyers. In a study of nearly 3,000 lawyers, Joan Williams, a law professor at the University of California Hastings, found that women are more likely to be judged in a harsher light than men when they display anger. Likely as a result, while 56% of white men felt free to express anger, only 44% of women, and 40% of women of color, felt free to do so.

Similarly, in a separate study led by Arizona State University psychology profession Jessica Salerno, nearly 700 people watched videos of male or female lawyers delivering an actual closing argument in a gruesome murder case using an angry tone. The study participants were then asked whether they would hire the lawyers who gave the closing arguments. While participants used positive aspects of the angry closings to justify hiring male lawyers, they referred to negative aspects of anger to justify not hiring the female lawyers.

Some people might react to this research by concluding that women just shouldn’t get angry in a work setting. Sutton says that “One of the simplest—but admittedly hardest—things you can do is simply learn not to give a shit. Not giving a shit takes the wind out of an asshole’s sails. When an asshole’s being nasty to you, ignore him.”

But it’s harder for female lawyers to ignore abusive male lawyers because women’s anger is fundamentally different than men’s. When a man is an asshole to a woman in a professional setting that experience is often cumulative. A woman gets angry not just about that guy, but about the one before that, and the one before that. And the boss who shrugged when she complained about it. And the 25 people on the email who saw what he wrote and didn’t call out the behavior. And the room full of colleagues who thought it was funny.

A Change in Perspective

While I want it to be acceptable for women to get angry when they’re subjected to abuse and vitriol, I certainly don’t believe that being angry all the time is going to help you. In fact, if you’re working with a male attorney who behaves like an asshole and you have to work with that person on a case or a matter for years, taking abuse and then getting angry about it can take an incredible toll. You can end up depressed or anxious, and ultimately suffer from burnout. I know several women who left the law because the last case they worked on had one of those guys.

But I want us to look at women’s anger in these situations differently because I’m also sick of being asked to take the high road about the antics that many women lawyers describe. I’m sick of people who say that this is just how our profession is and that we have to toughen up and take it. I’m sick of judges who, when considering a sanctions motion, judge a woman’s reaction to abusive behavior on the same scale as the man who initiated it. I’m sick of society saying that women are the ones responsible for curbing objectively outrageous behavior, while finding no outrage for those who engage in the behavior in the first place.

It’s high time that we start reframing women’s anger. As this fantastic article from the Guardian talks about, while anger can be destructive if not appropriately redirected, it can also be a catalyst for long-lasting and meaningful change. Maybe if women lawyers sometimes got a little angrier, we wouldn’t have as many workplaces filled with assholes.

Or - maybe the next time a female associate complains to you about dealing with an abusive opposing counsel, you get angry for her, so she doesn’t have to.

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