- Comes Now
- Posts
- The Workplace Is Not a Good Place for Young Women
The Workplace Is Not a Good Place for Young Women
A thought for Election Day
Jennifer Fountain Connolly
November 05, 2024
I thought about not writing an issue this week since this one will come out on Election Day, when our thoughts will be—and should be—on other things.
But Election Day is all about what we want for our future. While we, of course, vote in our own self-interest, hopefully we also vote because we want to change or preserve the world we’re leaving for those behind us. We vote for the people we love as much as ourselves.
In thinking about our desire to leave the world better than we found it, I was overwhelmed by the recent data continuing to show that, despite our best efforts, we haven’t managed to do that for younger women in the workplace. We certainly haven’t done that for more junior women lawyers.
So in this week’s short issue of Comes Now, we’re going to talk about how we haven’t yet improved things for the next generation of women and why that matters.
The World We’re Leaving Junior Women
Recent statistics about the experiences of younger women in the workplace have not been encouraging:
In addition, women are—and remain—scarce at the upper echelons of law firms. The most recent version of the New Partner Report by the Diversity & Flexibility Alliance (only available to Alliance members), which focuses on 196 of the largest and top-grossing law firms, found that, even though more than 80 firms had new partner classes that were made up of at least 50% women, the proportion of new U.S.-based partners who are women actually decreased—from 44% in 2023 to 42% in 2024. In addition, the gap in the share of new women partners compared to the share of women associates and women summer associates increased substantially.
A brand new report on sexual harassment from Tulane University found an increase in all forms of sexual harassment and assault for women ages 25-34 years. This led the authors to conclude that “Younger women, who have much shorter tenures, are just as likely as older women to have experienced some form of sexual harassment over the course of their career—a sign that it is not becoming any less common.”
What should we think about these depressing statistics? Our work is far from over. As Marianne Cooper and Priya Fielding-Singh remind us in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, younger women’s experiences in the workplaces show us that we must continue to ensure forward progress:
[G]ender equality won’t simply be achieved by the passage of time. Indeed, what history shows us is that social change requires deliberate and sustained efforts. Thus, instead of scaling back, it’s incumbent on companies to continue to push forward and take action.
…
Rather than subscribing to the conventional — and incorrect — wisdom that social progress is inevitable, it’s time for organizations to step up and do the real, hard work required to achieve it. If we want daughters to have it better than their mothers and grandmothers, we need to take off our rose-colored glasses and roll up our sleeves.
Much as we must continue to participate in our democracy even when it deeply disappoints us, we must continue to fight for better workplaces even when our organizations do not live up to their promises. We must do it for ourselves, and we must do it for the women coming behind us.
If you’re receiving this in a place where the polls are still open, go out and vote. If you’ve done that already, take good care of yourself in the coming days.
We’ll return to a fuller issue of Comes Now next week.
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].
Reply