GREAT EXPECTATIONS MEETS REALITY – YEARS LATER
‘Great Expectations for Female Lawyers’ by Florence Martin-Kessler (Video)
“The [young] women’s quotes — optimistic, supremely confident, even arrogant — could have been my own: “I don’t think there are things I can’t do” … “I don’t see any obstacles, so if I don’t get to the top it will be because of my own personal choices.” The picture at Debevoise & Plimpton seemed a microcosm of women everywhere (well, in many economic sectors in most of the industrialized world). Earlier this year, as I followed the debates sparked by Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg, I started wondering what had happened to the lawyers of “Great Expectations.” Surely they had forged an opinion about whether women could “have it all.” I found my old copy of the magazine. Soon, I picked up my phone and arranged meetings to interview them for this Op-Doc video.
I learned that, of the original women profiled in the article, only a handful of the young recruits of 2001 remained with the firm. (Of course, the attrition rate is high for men, too — but not nearly as high; in American law firms, the overwhelming majority of partners are men.) From the original 21, around half are in private practice, some are in powerful positions at corporations, others are working in public interest law and several became full-time parents. But what I found most interesting was that their lives were often far more complex than they had predicted. Even the greatest of expectations, it seems, eventually encounter reality. ”
Women can have it all – but they’ll likely pay a mommy penalty for it by Allison Linn
“The résumés that implied the woman was a mother generally got a lower competency and commitment rating, and a lower recommended salary, than the one for a woman who was not a mother. The résumés that implied a man was a dad, on the other hand, commanded a higher salary than the childless man.”
