Perhaps because the 4th of July holiday had my mind otherwise occupied, I struggled with coming up with a singular topic this week. But every Thursday I used to publish an issue to my Beehiiv subscribers called What I’m Reading & Thinking that talked about books and articles relevant to women lawyers that had caught my eye the previous week. So I decided to do one of those issues this week.

Let’s dive in.

When Women Follow Their “Passions”

I always start Comes Now issues with quotations. In selecting one, I try to capture something related to what I’ve chosen to write about. Doing so is rather maddening: if you try to search for quotations about a given topic, you almost always get quotations by men. Alternatively, if you search for quotations by women, you almost always get quotes about empowerment. While there’s nothing wrong with empowerment quotes, that’s not all women talk or care about. Even though women have spoken on virtually every topic men have talked about, you just can’t find what they’ve said.

My quotation process is relevant to a Yale study I read about this week which concluded that the seemingly gender-neutral advice to “follow your passions” can help explain the gender gap in STEM. It turns out that, much as the annoying AI who support Internet search engines make gendered assumptions reflected in our society, when we’re told to “follow our passions,” we also draw upon parts of ourselves that are socialized and gendered.

When study participants composed of 521 undergraduate students from a variety of racial backgrounds were primed with advice that emphasized following your passion and doing what you love, women were significantly less likely to choose majors or jobs in STEM fields than men. In contrast, when participants were asked to think about future income or job security, the gender gap narrowed.

The researchers replicated these results in follow-up studies with adults that pursued an additional line of inquiry. Namely, after being introduced to a follow-your-passion or resource-based ideology, participants were asked not only to list a career that would fit each ideology, but also to link each type of advice with feminine or masculine aspects of themselves. Those results showed that the follow-your-passion ideology caused women to draw upon aspects of themselves consistent with their socialized gender.

Thus, as we all know, it turns out that many women don’t choose specific career paths simply because they’re “better” at those paths or somehow more inclined to them—but because they’re socialized to think about their careers differently than men are. If men and women were socialized differently, we might have more women patent attorneys.

Women VCs Don’t Necessarily Fund More Female-Led Businesses

A few months ago I wrote an issue that asked whether women clients hire women lawyers. While there was little data I could use to answer that question in the legal profession, a study from the venture capital industry may shed some light on the issues involved.

Two professors of entrepreneurship recently analyzed eight years of funding decisions from more than 150 mid- and large-sized U.S.-based venture capital firms. They found that firms where the decision-making groups included more female senior venture capitalists offered less funding to women-led businesses than groups who included fewer female senior venture capitalists. In fact, every additional senior female venture capitalist in a firm’s decision-making group was linked to a 0.46% decline in the proportion of newly funded women-led businesses in its investment portfolio.

While you might think this is yet another example of women who fail to support other women, it turns out the reasons for this behavior are more complex than that. Male-dominated workplaces tend to foster a culture where women defer to their male counterparts—but the researchers found that venture capitalists can disrupt this deference in two ways.

First, when senior venture capitalists in a decision-making group had worked together previously, the researchers did not see the same impact on funding new women-led businesses. Second, when a decision-making group included politically neutral senior venture capitalists, the researchers also did not see those negative effects.

The researchers therefore suggested that venture capital firms explore inviting outside female investment professionals who have connections to many incumbent senior venture capitalists to work as consultants—so that there is a previous working relationship with the female participants who are perceived as politically neutral.

These recommendations would be difficult to implement in the legal profession where many internal communications are privileged. However, this research does suggest that integrating senior women from other law firms into a male-dominated workplace—perhaps through co-counsel relationships—could change decision-making dynamics in that workplace.

Remote Work Affects Women Differently at Different Stages of Their Careers

A study published [paywall] in the Harvard Business Review that looked at 1,055 software engineers at a Fortune 500 company found that while younger female engineers who worked from home suffered from a lack of mentorship from senior colleagues, older female engineers who worked from home were more productive because they were not required to devote as much time to the often invisible work of mentoring.

Much attention is given to the mentoring young attorneys lose when employees work remotely, so it’s refreshing to see a study that calls attention to the often unrecognized benefits of work-from-home policies, as well as the time and efforts senior women put into mentoring.

The researchers noted that the results were not immutable and depended on company culture. Women don’t have to be penalized for engaging in mentoring. “If providing thoughtful, high-quality training to junior colleagues is clearly recognized and rewarded—rather than falling into the category of invisible work that women often do for little reward—junior women may receive great training even from afar, and senior women may be better rewarded for the in-person mentorship they do.”

Men Can Benefit From Being Allies at Work

A 2020 report from Catalyst showed that only 31% of men feel confident in speaking up about sexism in the workplace because they fear negative career consequences and believe that speaking up won’t make a difference. However, one recent study suggests that men can actually benefit from challenging sexism in the workplace.

The study tasked 361 online participants with reviewing the decision by a hiring manager to hire for a vice president position. The hiring manager had to choose between a highly-qualified man and woman. Although the hiring manager was not sexist, the hiring manager knew that the CEO to whom the vice president would report was prejudiced against women and preferred to hire a man.

The study found that when the hiring manager went along with the male CEO’s sexist desire to hire a man, the participants also viewed the hiring manager as sexist. And the participants judged the male hiring manager who went along with the male CEO more harshly than they judged a woman who did so. This led the researchers to conclude that men who challenge other men’s sexism are viewed more favorably.

Of course, the study involved an example where the CEO’s sexism was a given. There were no questions of subtlety or implicit bias. I wonder if the results would have been the same in more ambiguous circumstances.

Share Comes Now!

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please share it with others and encourage them to subscribe. I draft it on Beehiiv (Comes Now (beehiiv.com)) and distribute it on Tuesday evening, but also post the issue as a LinkedIn newsletter on Wednesday mornings.

Have a topic you’d like me to address? Want to tell me where I got something right or wrong? Send me an email at [email protected].