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Emily Chang's Brotopia
What her 2019 book can tell us about women in the legal profession
I’m trying to buy fewer books on Amazon and instead support independent bookstores. So I was recently going through my Amazon wish list to move all of my saved books to a wish list on Bookshop.com. Emily Chang’s book Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley was on my Amazon wish list, and there weren’t many copies left, so I bought a copy. While the book is not without its flaws, it got me thinking about similarities between the bro culture of the relatively young tech industry and that of the old and stodgy legal profession.
There was one chapter in particular that I kept thinking about after I finished the book: the chapter entitled “Superheroes and Superjerks: The Role of the Venture Capitalists.” It reminded me that we can’t just look at the law when we ask why women have not reached gender parity in our profession. Instead, we need to look at the entire system that keeps us shut out from the highest echelons of power. What Brotopia illuminates is that the things that keep women sidelined in the tech industry are not singular. They are interrelated and reinforce each other.
Venture Capitalists and Silicon Valley
The first third of Brotopia is devoted to how the tech industry itself has traditionally excluded women, but it then turns to the role of the male-dominated venture capital industry. Venture capitalists, of course, are the companies who decide whether to fund new companies. They’re important not just because they can make or break fledgling companies, but because the right venture capital company can open doors to key power players in Silicon Valley and the larger business community. As Chang says: “If entrepreneurs are the princes of Silicon Valley, a few dozen VC partners at a handful of firms are the kingmakers. Every founder wants the top VC’s helping hands up to the throne, but each investor makes only one or two investments a year, so the competition is crushing.”
Like the tech industry itself, the venture capital industry is incredibly male-dominated. At the time Brotopia was published, men ran 92% of VC-backed companies nationwide. This has natural consequences for the type of leaders attracted to the field. Male-dominated cultures are more likely to be led by narcissists. In fact, in a paper that consolidated thirty-one years of research and involved nearly half a million participants, Emily Grijalva of SUNY Buffalo found that men consistently score higher than women when it comes to narcissistic traits such as exhibitionism, feelings of entitlement, and the willingness to employ unethical or exploitative behavior to get ahead. Where you find men in power, you’re more likely to find narcissism.
Male leaders of venture capital companies have traditionally hired people who look and act like them, and defend doing so by saying the tech field is a meritocracy where the cream rise to the top. In 2014, women accounted for just 6 percent of venture capital partners. For years the industry defended its lack of women by pointing to the lack of women with science and computer degrees. But Chang points out that excuse has little merit, as almost 40% of the top male venture capitalists do not have a technical background.
As Brotopia gets into, it’s not just that women aren’t hired or promoted. Even if they sneak into one of the top venture capital firms, they often aren’t invited to social events. This not only prevents women from forming relationships with their colleagues, but keeps them from hearing industry gossip and getting the most plum assignments. They are frequently subjected to sexual harassment. Male venture capitalists have not only harassed their colleagues: they have intimidated and harassed female founders who need their money and connections.
Unsurprisingly, these aspects of the venture capital industry cast a long shadow on female founders. As quoted in Brotopia, in 2017 VCs invested a little over $67 billion in companies with all-male founders, while female-only teams received just $1.9 billion. The average size of an investment in a company led by men was about $12 million compared to $5 million on average for women.
What This Has To Do With the Legal Profession
We’ve talked a lot in this newsletter about how—like the tech and venture capital industries—the legal profession is male-dominated, especially at the top. So you see narcissist behavior: exhibitionism, feelings of entitlement, and the willingness to employ unethical or exploitative behavior to get ahead. Thus, like women in the tech industry, women lawyers are subjected to sexual harassment, excluded from male-only social events, and are often denied access to the currency needed to advance their careers.
But, as the analogy to the venture capital industry shows, it’s much deeper than that. It’s not just the legal profession itself, but the industries and professions adjacent to it that keep women out.
What do I mean by this? Men not only get paid and promoted more than women but, by being at the top, they gain access to resources and people necessary to practice law at the highest level. I recall attending mediations at the office of a well-known male mediator. Even though I’ve been in the center of some of the largest cases he’s resolved over the past 15 years, he still doesn’t remember my name. It’s not that he has amnesia, he just remembers the guys who vacation the same places, who’ve given him access to private planes and club tickets to sporting events. And, when he reports back to federal judges about how the mediation is going, he’s talking about those same guys. It reinforces the power system that has existed for years and keeps women from joining the same circles. Even if a woman is leading a complex case, it’s likely a guy who’s known him for years who’s going to make the call to this mediator.
Another example is expert witnesses. At the top of various fields there is a small group of people to call who can survive cross-examination by the country’s best lawyers at trial. Those experts are always going to take calls from the guys who repeatedly hire them, who’ve funded their second, third, and fourth homes, and whose kids attend the same private schools. And they’re not only going to take their calls, they’ll agree to work on a case without much persuasion. Try calling one of these guys if you never have before: even if you can afford them and they call you back, they’ll tell you why your case is doomed to fail.
This network extends to the other side of the v. When it comes time to resolve complex cases, lawyers typically call lawyers with whom they’ve worked before. I have repeatedly seen lawyers on the plaintiffs’ side bypass a female lawyer on the defense side (typically described as the b-word) to call a guy at the same firm they know. There are lawyers at large defense firms who are known for making big problems go away—and for the most part those lawyers are not women. So even if a woman got the client, ran the case from beginning to end, and achieved all the strategic victories—at the end of the day, the call to resolve the case goes to a male colleague.
These are relatively benign examples, but there are many, many others. I’m also speaking from a litigation perspective because that’s where I come from—but I’m sure that there are just as many examples on the transactional side of things, or for prosecutors or public defenders. These adjacent networks not only hobble women lawyers in leadership, but they entrench traditional ways of doing things that might otherwise change with women in power.
The takeaway from all this is that we not only need to get women into leadership positions—and keep them there—but we must help them to break into these secret networks so that they can lead without being circumvented by a guy who wants to do things the way they’ve always been done. As Brotopia shows, it’s silence that has allowed these secret networks to persist, and it’s sunlight that will finally break them.
Coming Up On April 10!!
I’m excited to announce that on April 10 at 3:30 Eastern I’ll be doing a live discussion with two of my friends, Rachel Clar, Founder and CEO of Interconnected Us, and Emily Logan Stedman, a partner at Husch Blackwell. We’ll be talking about Women Who Don’t Support Other Women and What To Do About It. Rachel and Emily are fabulous, so you should absolutely join us (and follow both Rachel and Emily on LinkedIn if you don’t already) for a candid discussion of a tough topic. You can sign up at this link.
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