I recently finished reading Erin Gordon’s memoir Look What You Made Me Do: Confronting Heartbreak & Harassment in Big Law and wanted to write a newsletter about it. I’m not going to do a book review per se but instead wanted to talk about a number of things that struck me as a I read it.

The book is the true story of Gordon’s experience as a young associate in a San Francisco BigLaw firm she gives the name Schiffler Mulligan. Although the term “hostile work environment” was just coming into use, Schiffler Mulligan was clearly such an environment. Ultimately, the experience of working there causes Gordon to leave the firm, and eventually to leave the practice of law entirely.

The structure of the book is unusual. The first part of the book is Gordon’s story of what happened to her at Schiffler Mulligan, which ends with her consulting two employment attorneys who advise her not to pursue a case against her former firm. The second part of the book consists of summaries from interviews with people who worked with her. The last part of the book is a brief description of Gordon’s life after the law, and some reflections about the lasting effects that her time at Schiffler Mulligan had on her life.

Gordon is writing this story 30 years after the events she describes occurred, so it goes without saying that everything she endured profoundly affected her. It was tough for me to read in places. Gordon is roughly my age and, while our experiences were different in some ways, many of the things she describes were eerily familiar. If you’re also in your 50s, you may feel the same way. (Conversely, if you’re younger, it may help you to understand what the generations ahead of you experienced.)

Regardless of your age, if you’ve experienced any type of trauma in the workplace, you’ll recognize her voice. Even though in some ways the book is a quick read (it’s just 185-pages), if you’ve experienced something similar you might want to take it slow. Here are a few things that particularly spoke to me.

Takeaway #1 - How Women Internalize Gaslighting

One of the things that becomes clear throughout Look What You Made Me Do is the way her experience at Schiffler Mulligan changed the voice with which Gordon spoke to herself. After all, that’s what gaslighting is about: be told a story about yourself long enough and eventually, you’ll believe it.

In one of her reflection chapters, Gordon mentions that people who read her early drafts of the book said that she still seemed really bitter. She responds:

When I was a young lawyer, people didn’t talk about how a toxic workplace can have ripples—even waves—throughout your professional life. It takes years—and lots of love and support from other people in your life—to stop hearing those voices. It’s why we can’t—and shouldn’t—minimize these experiences or suggest that women just get over them.

It’s also why younger women lawyers may sometimes find it difficult to find older women lawyers to support them. In many cases, older women lawyers have internalized decades of stories about themselves and women lawyers generally. It’s hard to reach out to someone else when you don’t think highly of yourself in the first place.

Takeaway #2 - We must support each other

One of the most profound parts of the book is when Gordon interviews a female partner named Elizabeth who worked at Schiffler Mulligan at the same time Gordon did. Gordon admits that while she was a first-year she was “terrified” of Elizabeth and also angry at her and the other women partners for tolerating the behavior of the popular clique of men at the firm Gordon calls The Club:

But when Gordon interviews Elizabeth, she learns that Elizabeth’s life at the firm was much different than Gordon had imagined. Elizabeth explains that, even though there was a lot of misogyny at the office where she worked, she wanted to fit in, and therefore “giggle[d] at jokes that minimized my gender.” She drank heavily to survive. While she tried to speak out about the culture once she became a partner, she was punished for doing so, and ultimately had to negotiate an exit. For that reason, she was stunned by the #metoo movement: “Never in my life did I think this [reckoning] would happen. We’re a subjugated gender—I figured, that was my fate, that we should be lucky for the crumbs we get in life.”

After Gordon interviews Elizabeth, she reflects on the discussion and realizes that Elizabeth had “simply been doing at Schiffler Mulligan what I’d been trying to do: fit into a hostile crowd”—and Gordon is blown away but how both their lives would have been different if they had only helped each other at the time. She concludes:

This past week there were reports by women on LinkedIn of rampant sexual harassment at the Legal Week conference. These incidents were also reported by male allies who either witnessed or heard about the conduct. It’s that type of world—where we call out gross and inappropriate behavior and support the women who are subjected to it—that could have made a difference to Gordon. And to Elizabeth.

Takeaway #3 - The System Wasn’t Made for Us

As part of her research at the end of the book, Gordon spoke to Joan Williams, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the UC College of Law. I voraciously read Williams’ works after I had my first child, but don’t recall the specific observation Gordon passes along in her book. Namely, Williams explained that, decades before women joined law firms, the white men who worked at them prided themselves on keeping “banker’s hours” of 11-3:00 and then going to play golf. But, as soon as women entered the profession, the culture changed to a “work devotion schema” where working hours was glorified. As Gordon explains: “In other words, consciously or unconsciously, this ‘grinder’ mentality was men dictating the terms, a way for them to mark territory, a way to ensure the profession was unwelcoming and harder for women to navigate.”

Although working long hours wasn’t a key aspect of Gordon’s story at Schiffler Mulligan, Williams’ observation really struck me. So often we are told that flexible work schedules, remote work, and other work arrangements can’t be done in the legal profession, because it’s always been the way it is now. But, as with so many other contexts in which that phrase rears its head, Williams shows that just isn’t the case. Instead, the workplace changed in order to keep women out of it.

If we can change the profession to make it harder for women to enter and stay, we can change it to make it easier.

Takeaway #4 - Keep Telling Our Stories

Some of the most powerful parts of this book are the parts where Gordon reflects on the natures of trauma, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves. I won’t list all the observations she makes that stopped me in my tracks, but, I do want to talk about her closing message—the importance of sharing our stories. While reading Look What You Made Me Do, it’s obvious to me how difficult it was for Gordon to write the book. In many places she talks about times she tried to talk herself out of it. But ultimately she knew that her story needed to be told—for other women who’ve suffered similar things, and for herself. She ends the book with this:

There’s a lot in those closing paragraphs. I’ve talked a bit in these newsletters about how we’ve all internalized the misogyny in our profession and our workplaces. Part of that internalization is the shame we feel about what has happened to us. And when we feel shame, we close ourselves off from other people. We isolate. But that’s exactly the opposite of what we should do in order to heal. There are so many of us who have had experiences like Gordon’s. We need to share those stories—to help others heal, to help ourselves heal, and to begin to change our workplaces.

There are many women lawyers on LinkedIn doing this work and helping other women do so. I’m thinking of doing an issue in the future profiling some of them. In the meantime, start with reading Gordon’s book.

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