A Bit About My Story

I have two kids. I had my first child, my daughter, when I was 35. Back then I thought that I couldn’t possibly have a child before I made partner—because I didn’t think my firm would give me the flexibility required to be a working mom until I did so. At that time there was a belief that women had to earn the right to have children while they were working.

What “flexibility” did I get once I made partner? With both pregnancies I was given—and took—three-month paid maternity leaves. I considered myself lucky, particularly working at a plaintiffs’ firm. Yet despite having that time, I pretty much worked through my first leave. My daughter was born in February of a year I was scheduled to be on the trial team for a complex case beginning in December so, despite what the law required, I couldn’t afford to check out for three months if I wanted the rare chance to try a class action. I got a little more downtime with my second-born, but I did not return to work feeling refreshed. Even with a husband who stayed at home with the kids—a privilege most lawyers do not have—it was much harder to navigate life with two children than it was with one.

In most “mom as lawyer” descriptions, the story ends there: it’s as if the many challenges of being a mom and a lawyer end with the difficulty of returning to work. Likewise, many legal workplaces assume that, if they have fulsome family leave policies, their obligations to working mothers end there.

But I found it harder to be a working mom as the kids got older. Motherhood is so much less visible once you’re no longer having office baby showers and waddling around as big as a house. While I eventually just started taking what I needed (something that was admittedly easier when I was working from home), I could fill a book with the gymnastics necessary to be a litigation partner at the highest levels and a half-way decent mother.

Work Life “Balance”

Most people think that the biggest problems in working as a mom are in finding so-called work-life balance. Google “lawyer and working mom” and the vast majority of the articles you’ll find relate to how to find an elusive balance between work and home life.

But I’m not a huge fan of the guidance to find work-life balance. For the most part, that puts the onus on women to find balance in their lives, when the focus should be on how employers can make it easier for women to reconcile their professional lives with their lives as mothers. Balance is also an elusive concept that means different things to different people at different points in their lives. And, because the concept is elusive, it’s tough for you to use it to advocate for what you need, and it’s equally difficult for employers to understand. (It’s far better to say “I need to work from home Tuesday and Thursday afternoons” than “I need more work-life balance.”)

I’m also not sure that balance is really what working mothers are looking for. Instead, they’re just asking their workplaces to treat them as adults: to recognize that they may need to do something during school hours and then make up those hours later in the evening, to allow them to run an errand when things are slower without having to request PTO, to be able to say that they’re exhausted because their toddler kept them up all night, or because they had to help their teenager complete college applications—without getting an eye roll in return. Ultimately, working mothers need flexibility. And then they need to not be penalized when they take that flexibility.

If such a workplace sounds like an impossible dream, imagine for a moment whether it would seem that way if the legal profession were one that had been dominated by women for over a century. Is practicing law with the recognition that we are all human beings really that much to ask?

A Few Things the Profession Must Do

Surprisingly, we have known for decades some things that might make it easier for women to navigate the practice of law while having children. One law review article on motherhood in the legal profession from Winter 1997 proposes the following solutions:

• Accept the human need for a balanced life that incorporates time for familial as well as professional and social responsibilities.

• Reduce the emphasis on excessive hourly billing in lieu of fixed fee and value billing.

• Adopt policies for implementing part-time work and partnership arrangements.

It’s really just as easy as allowing women to get the work done when and where they can, and defining work as something other than facetime and billing hours for the sake of billing. Yet twenty-six years after the law review article I found, most of these things still are not the norm in legal workplaces.

In addition, women should not be penalized financially for becoming mothers. Yet that is precisely what happens. Once women have children, the pay disparity between men and women widens dramatically. (In the Rant & Raves section below, I talk a little bit about Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin’s work in this area.) This is not a parenthood penalty; it is a motherhood one: while women get paid less once they become mothers, when men become fathers, they get paid more. (The end of the article notes an exception for women in the top 10 percent of earners, but women aren’t typically in this bracket at the time they have children.)

Without these things, the legal profession will remain a place with only old white men at the top as women leave the profession entirely after having children. As a profession we must do better, and as women we must demand better.

Rants & Raves

• Rant. Happy that LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company publish an annual assessment of Women in the Workplace. But can they not release the study with the title “2023 Women in the Workplace Report Finds Women Are as Ambitious as Ever?” Have you ever seen a report that announced that men are, in fact, ambitious? While I suppose there are some male leaders dense enough to require a study to learn that women have ambition, it’s disappointing that the report would be released with that headline. It implies that we need to study women to see why they’re not advancing fast enough, when in reality—as the remainder of the report’s findings show—we need to study women’s workplaces.

• Rave. Claudia Goldin, a fellow University of Chicago alum, won the Nobel Prize in Economics. She was the first woman to win the prize solo. Even better, she won the award for studying the gender wage gap, women’s participation in the job market, and the future of the labor force. One of her most notable findings—based on a 15-year study of business school students at the UofC—was that the gender wage gap really takes off after a woman has her first child. Ironically, a few days after receiving the prize, she published a new working paper exploring why the progress of gender parity, after accelerating in the 1970s, has slowed significantly since then. More on that paper in a later issue.

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