Job interviews can be unpleasant because, despite the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's guidelines about what employers may ask consistent with anti-discrimination laws, some judges and lawyers continue to ask women questions about their marital status and plans for having children. Remarks such as, "You're so pretty; I don't care about your grades" and requests for dates are also not uncommon. Telling the interviewer off is fine if you don't want the job, but it is not diplomatic if you do. Law school interviews offer a small measure of protection. Encourage your placement office to advise interviewers that biased questioning is not permitted and will not be ignored. Report such questioning to the placement office. Law schools have taken a variety of actions in these situations, from admonitory letters to barring the firm from on- campus recruiting for a year.
Asking about family leave and part-time work policies during interviews can be tricky. Some employers already assume that women's priorities place family a distinct first ahead of work and worry that the money, time, and effort invested in training women will be wasted because they will just have babies and stay home or leave town when their husbands are transferred. Asking about relevant policies at your interview could confirm, in the interviewer's mind, the belief that women are not adequately committed to the profession. You can have some control over this problem when you are interviewing while still at law school by encouraging your placement office to require campus interviewers to complete a data sheet that will give you the critical information for which you may hesitate to ask.
Subsequent to law school you can contact your law school placement office to obtain current information on these points. If the school does not have it, you will have to ask for this information if the employer does not offer it orally or in written form. Family leave and sexual harassment policies are too important to be left to on-the-job surprises. Assume that any interviewer whose nose is put out of joint by your asking about these policies is not someone with whom you would want to work.
Employment Barriers
To varying degrees, women continue to find barriers to full equal employment opportunity throughout the legal profession. Criminal justice has been the most difficult field for women to crack because of its image as a macho preserve. Only four women have ever been elected attorney general of their states. Women U.S. attorneys are almost as rare. Many men prosecutors fear that women will spoil the camaraderie of the office or won't be able to get along with the police. There are extremely few women doing white-collar criminal defense work.
A National Law Journal study of the country's 250 largest law firms revealed that although as of September 30, 1987, 40 percent of the associates hired in the prior two years were women, women constitute only 23 percent of the lawyers at these firms and less than 8 percent of the partners (1,546 women out of 19,610 partners). At the current rate of increase, by the year 2000 only one in five partners will be women. The National Law Journal noted that a 1985 forecast that the percentage rate of women partners would have doubled or trebled by 1988 or 1989 had "fizzled, in part, because more and more female attorneys, particularly on the associate level, are showing dissatisfaction with life at the mega firms and are leaving for smaller firms, part-time work, teaching or other alternatives." Even women who become partners in large firms sometimes find that they are not welcomed into the management structure of their firms.
Client resistance to women attorneys continues to be a problem in both law firms and corporate legal departments. A client who brings business to a firm or a manager who brings a problem to the legal department may say flatly that he does not want a woman on the case. Many law firms and general counsels (the chief "in-house" lawyers for a company or institution) insist that the client take the lawyer assigned, regardless of sex. But there are reports from corporate counsel that insisting sometimes leads to the manager's cutting back on consultation with the legal department and finding ways to give work to outside counsel who accept their sexist dictates.
Small firms, particularly in more rural areas, sometimes do not want to hire women at all or let them try only family law cases. Women are still a small percentage of law school faculty members-at some schools there is only one woman teaching-and those who raise feminist issues may be denigrated by their colleagues and students and denied tenure.
Women seeking judgeships continue to be asked questions about their husbands and children by judicial selection commissions. Even women on the bench find that some male colleagues have difficulty in accepting them. Moreover, women have lost ground in appointments to the federal bench. Women were 15 percent of Carter Administration appointees but only 8.6 percent of Reagan Administration appointments. Although 14 percent of Bush Administration appointees have been women, this has not compensated for the ground lost during the Reagan years that should have been a significant growth period for female judges.
Several bar association studies have shown a sharp disparity between men and women attorneys' earnings. A 1987 ABA study, for example, showed men's median earnings at f 71,710 and women's at $40,190. According to the researchers, this disparity cannot be wholly explained by the fact that women as a group are younger than men, have fewer years in practice, and work in lower-paying government and public-sector jobs than do men. A 1989 survey by the ABA's Young Lawyers Division concluded that "[w]omen continue to be far worse off financially than their male colleagues in most positions."
Sexual Harassment
Sexual harassment-demanding sexual favors in exchange for grades, hiring, promotion, or retention and verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature that creates an offensive work environment-is as prevalent in law schools and the legal profession as it is in every other academic and business setting. While the landmark 1984 case applying employment discrimination laws to partnerships was pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, the defending law firm subjected its women summer associates to an impromptu bathing suit contest during the firm's summer outing. Some women said they did not mind, but others were appalled. None was willing to object, however, lest she be branded a bad sport and not offered a permanent position. After the placement office in a mid-western law school was advised that one partner at a particular firm was engaging in extreme verbal sexual harassment, the placement office responded only that it would stop placing women with that firm.
Some young women associates have had their careers derailed at their firms by the following scenario. An older male partner and a young female associate are out of town on a case. Late at night, after a few drinks, he knocks on her door. Whether she says yes or no, the next morning he is mortified and wants to distance himself from her and any memory of the event. The next time she is assigned to his team he says he doesn't want her, her work the last time just wasn't up to snuff, and so begins the insidious destruction of her professional reputation in the firm. Some women who have lived through this experience suggest trying to defuse it at the start by treating it lightly, saying, "No, it's late, let's both forget this happened and go on doing good work together." But there are no easy answers.
A written, comprehensive sexual harassment policy that includes training, prevention, and enforcement for schools and employers is necessary. This ensures that the harassing supervisor, interviewer, or coworker can be reported. The ABA's Commission on Women in the Profession has published a manual, Lawyers and Balanced Lives: A Guide to Drafting and Implementing Workplace Policies for Lawyers, which includes sample policies for sexual harassment, parental leave, and alternative work schedules for use in law schools and practice organizations.
See the following articles for more information:
- 21 Major Interview Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs
- The Best Way to Prepare for a Job Search and Interviews
- How to Talk About Other Interviews in Your Interviews
- How to Answer the Tell Me About Yourself Interview Question
- How to Answer the Do You Have Any Questions for Me Interview Question