It'll Be Easier To Go To The Moon Again Than To Close The Gender Parity Gap In Law
Where is our will, our perseverance, our determination for gender parity in the profession?
Please explain to me why this country could land men on the moon and have them walk on the lunar surface 50 years ago, and women today still can’t break the glass ceiling in a profession that still hinders us from gender parity.
Since most of the ATL readers were born at least a dozen or so years after the moonwalk (and I am not talking about Michael Jackson’s), it’s hard for millennials and those younger to understand how momentous that occasion was for us dinosaurs. We were in the middle of the Cold War and Russia had been beating the pants off of us in space, at least until President Kennedy said, essentially, “Enough, we’re going to beat the pants off Russia before the end of the decade.” And we did.
To see the nation and indeed the world hold their collective breaths was remarkable and those who witnessed the moon landing and moonwalk will never forget them. We had lived through a decade of turmoil: Vietnam, both the war and the anti-war protests; assassinations of President Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King, and Senator Robert Kennedy; cities burning. I could go on. We all wanted something to hold on to, to show each other and the world that we could collaborate, come together as a team to do something that was unimaginable even a few years before. We had the will, the perseverance, the determination for Apollo 11 to succeed and it did. So did we.
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Where is our will, our perseverance, our determination for gender parity in the profession? Don’t look at me. I’ve been jumping up and down about this for years, as have many of my dinosaurial colleagues (both women and men). Jumping up and down after a while gets tiring, and I’m tired, in fact, I’m pooped. So are many others.
Where is the leadership? I don’t care who it is and where it comes from. It could be a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater.
I am tired of hearing how much progress we’re allegedly making in law firms. Please, spare me. Yes, we’re doing better in corporate, academia, and the judiciary, but I don’t think such achievements point the way to parity.
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There have been a number of articles in newspapers and elsewhere — “think pieces” is what journalists call them — about why it’s so unlikely that we will, in my lifetime, and maybe even yours, ever see anything like Apollo 11 again. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times talked about why what happened 50 years ago could not be replicated now, and I think comments apply to our profession’s seeming reluctance to move forward.
What made Apollo 11 possible? It was a number of factors, including a tolerance for risk, a leadership culture, and a collaborative political environment, things that do not exist today. It was management, national commitment, and the personal motivation of the participants.
Speaking at Rice University in Houston in 1962, President Kennedy said that “we choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Yes, gender parity is not easy to achieve, yes, it is hard, but we need leadership, commitment, and personal motivation, to move the needle more than just a little bit. Do we have leadership, commitment, and personal motivation to make that happen? You tell me.
Yes, things have improved for women lawyers in the past 50 years. True, but only up to a point. More than 50 percent of current law students are women. It also doesn’t explain why, as women move up the ranks, their numbers dwindle, nor does it explain why women compose less than 25 percent of equity partners. Women fare better in leadership positions in both corporate and academic environments, not to mention the judiciary.
So, we put men on the moon, but we seem to be unable and/or unwilling to do what needs to be done for gender parity here on earth. For those of us who were sentient 50 years ago, who watched the lunar landing from wherever we were at that time, it seemed like the nation and the world were, for a few precious moments, one. That’s certainly not true today.
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Gerry Griffin, an Apollo-era flight director, who later became head of the Johnson Space Center in Texas, said that the risk-taking culture of the time propelled the man on the moon project forward. That culture didn’t know what a comfort zone was. As he said in the Los Angeles Times article, “The leadership pushed decisions down in the organization, they didn’t elevate them. They trusted people below them. The idea was, let’s not worry about who gets credit; let’s not second-guess everybody.” That doesn’t sound familiar today.
Regardless of what some people say, gender parity is not a “pipeline” problem; there are plenty of women who can succeed in law firms, but who aren’t given opportunities to do so, and who then drop out the higher they rise. It’s not just leaving to take care of the family and/or the kids or to pursue other opportunities. It’s fights about origination credits; it’s reluctance to share the work. The biases are real. When women lead, men are more likely to react badly, using the old tropes of “bossy,” “aggressive,” or other similar unflattering and demeaning adjectives.
The moon is approximately 240,000 miles away. That distance may well be easier to span than closing the gender parity gap. As President Kennedy said, we need to do this “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” We do lots of hard things, but gender parity needn’t be one of them.
Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.
