I hope everyone has a happy Halloween. Today we are discussing a very spooky topic - toxic workplaces. I usually start out an issue of this newsletter with a personal anecdote, but I have so many stories about this topic I couldn’t possibly pick from among them. So I’m just going to get started.

Why This Topic Matters to Women Lawyers

Although it hasn’t always been the case, these days it’s quite common to hear discussions about toxic workplaces. And they’re undoubtedly common in the legal profession.

Toxic workplaces also affect women far more than men. According to a study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review based on over 3 million reviews on Glassdoor between 2016 and 2021, women are 41% more likely than men to experience a toxic workplace culture. Sadly, that number gets worse as women advance to the C-Suite: at that level, women were 53% more likely to experience toxicity in the workplace.

In fact, as the same MIT study suggests, one could very well make the case that the presence of a toxic workplace is the single biggest gender gap between men and women.

Even controlling for demographic factors (occupation, industry, length of employment, and gender), gender was the second most important predictor of whether an employee mentioned toxicity in his or her Glassdoor review.

Predictably, toxic workplaces have many negative consequences, including a disproportionate impact on an employee’s mental and physical health. Leaving a toxic workplace unchecked can affect employee performance, engagement, and attrition. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, one in five U.S. workers has left a workplace because of a toxic environment. It is one of the most important—if not the most important—reasons women leave workplaces. So if we want to keep women in the law, we need to figure out how to take down toxic workplaces.

A Question of Definition

Before we talk about the best way to do that, a moment about the word “toxic.” The MIT Sloan Management Review study discussed above defined a toxic workplace as a culture “that is disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, or abusive.” But I think we all realize that we use the term far more broadly than MIT does. After all, “toxic” has been used to describe friendships, romantic relationships, and parents. And then there’s Britney.

In fact, while on one hand a toxic workplace is an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing, I suspect that the overuse of the term has made it more difficult to fix underlying issues. The presence of sexual harassment in a workplace should be dealt with (and legally, must be dealt with) differently than a partner who berates associates any time they make a mistake. And an employee who’s stealing from an employer must be handled in a different way than a supervisor who magically finds a way to avoid hiring female associates who show up to the interview visibly pregnant.

In addition, while in smaller workplaces this can be the case, it’s sometimes not the entire workplace that is toxic: there can be one particularly narcissist partner, or a co-worker on a single team who’s allowed to be abusive. Toxic influences can also come from outside your workplace: you may have a supervisor who’s desperate to ingratiate himself with clients, co-counsel, or vendors—and therefore doesn’t want to rock the boat by putting a stop to behavior by those people. Suffice to say, varieties of toxic workplaces abound.

What We Can Do About It

For these reasons, I sometimes wish we would stop using the term “toxic workplace” altogether. Given the ambiguities encompassed within the term, it simply doesn’t help someone with the power to change things to understand what is actually going on. And, when we choose to share stories about our toxic workplaces, that sharing is less powerful when we use such an overbroad word. When we describe a supervisor, a co-worker, or a workplace as “toxic,” we need to be specific about the behavior encompassed within that term.

But even if you find the right words, it may not make a difference. It’s extremely difficult for a single person (unless that person is at the top) to change a toxic workplace. As the Simon Sinek quotation at the beginning of this article suggests, leaders must take care of the people who work for them. Mistreatment, gaslighting, microaggressions, sexual harassment, and pay disparities all originate from power disparities between the men who engage in that type of conduct and the women upon whom it is inflicted, so, until and unless there are sufficient people (read: women) in power who will refuse to tolerate that type of conduct, it will continue to occur.

Much as I can’t stand articles that suggest we can cure burnout by attending yoga classes, it probably doesn’t surprise you that I don’t much like articles that portend to give advice about “surviving” a toxic work environment. If you’re working in a place that is, in MIT’s terms, “disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, or abusive”—and your employer won’t fix it—you can only “survive” in the short-term, while you’re looking for another job. Particularly if the source of toxicity is at the top, or from an important rainmaker, practice leader, or other politically powerful person, things are not going to change.

In my view, change will require far more dramatic options. Ultimately, as women we have to stop working for places that tolerate toxic behavior. As I discussed a little last week in the issue about Girl Power, we have to talk about toxic workplaces or people and, if they don’t change, speak with our feet.

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