Stephanie Early Green

Category: Law

A sexual harassment story

November 13, 2017 / / 2 Comments

We are experiencing an interesting and refreshing cultural moment, in which sexual harassment has become a thing that we are talking about publicly. It’s remarkable; not only are we talking about it, but powerful men are being brought low by revelations that they’ve treated people (mostly women, but sometimes men) poorly. We’re finding out that powerful men from all walks of life — luminaries of the art world, successful businessmen, beloved politicians — have done awful, disgusting things with zero consequences. They’ve made degrading comments, they’ve touched and groped, they’ve exposed themselves, they’ve raped. They’ve wielded power to satisfy themselves and to make others feel small. They’ve been doing it for years, decades, centuries, but only now are we talking about it, or perhaps only now are we listening.

If you poke around the internet for even a few minutes, it becomes apparent that a lot of regular, non-famous, non-powerful men are surprised, even shocked, by these emerging stories of sexual harassment and abuse. I’m willing to bet, though, that not a single woman who has ever stepped foot outside her home is surprised or shocked by these stories. I am willing to bet that every woman has her own story (or, more likely, stories) of sexual harassment and/or abuse. These are stories that we don’t like to tell. They’re not fun. They’re embarrassing, even shameful. They make us feel stupid and small, looking back at how we were treated, how we let ourselves be talked to or touched. But now that people have started to bring these festering stories into the light, I think continuing to tell them is important. Exposure and momentum are important. And it can be cathartic to unburden yourself of some of the weight you’ve been lugging around by yourself.

But it’s also scary. I don’t want to be attacked for reporting what someone else did to me. And this is what happens, when people (especially women) speak up about being harassed. People who don’t want to believe them look for reasons to dismiss them, or silence them. Women who tell their stories are labeled as crazy, slutty, stupid, venal, asking for it. I don’t want to be accused of lying or profit-seeking, so when I tell my little sexual harassment story here, I won’t be identifying the man I’m talking about by name. It’s not worth it to me. But it is worth it to put the story itself out into the universe, even without the guy’s name. It’ll make me feel better, if nothing else. (Also, it would probably be REALLY easy to figure out who he is with basic internet research, but I’ll leave that to you, intrepid reader).

I’m sad to admit that I’ve been sexually harassed in some form in nearly every job I’ve had. Some of these instances were worse than others. Some I’ve probably forgotten. But the ones that really stick with me are the ones that happened to me early on, when I was just starting out in the working world.

A few months after I graduated college in 2005, I moved to São Paulo to take a job as a paralegal at an international law firm. I got the job through a Stanford alumnus who had somehow come across my resume. I’d already gotten into Harvard Law School but had decided to defer for a year, and this alum thought I’d be an asset to his firm’s Sao Paulo office. During the recruitment process, my future boss — let’s call him J — promised me a whole host of benefits: an apartment paid for by the firm, free meals, access to a car, fair pay. He set up a video interview for me with his bosses, the managing partners of the office. During the interview, one of the partners kept complaining that he couldn’t see my face clearly and wanted to know what I looked like. It was obvious from his repeated questions about my appearance during the interview that he wanted to make sure I was pretty. It made me squeamish, but I brushed it off, figuring this was the way of the world, especially in a Latin American outpost of a big firm. It wasn’t that bad, just a little uncomfortable.

After the video interview, I was offered the job and I accepted. I was giddy with excitement. I was willing to move to Brazil not knowing a single soul — I had never even met J, the guy who set up the job for me. It would be a grand adventure and a great learning opportunity. A few days before I was to depart for São Paulo, I contacted J, expecting him to let me know where my apartment would be and how I could access the car he’d promised me once I arrived. He informed me that I would be living with him until an apartment could be arranged. You might be thinking that this sounds highly inappropriate and unprofessional. It was. And it made me uncomfortable, just as the video interview had. But I felt there wasn’t much I could do. I was dependent on J to arrange everything for me. At that point, my Portuguese was rudimentary, I had never been to the city, I knew no one, and so felt I had no choice but to move in with J until he could sort out my living situation. I flew to São Paulo and took a taxi to J’s address. His cleaning lady let me in and showed me to the guest room. I was expecting I’d stay at J’s apartment for a couple of days, max. It turned out to be weeks. I felt so uncomfortable living there that I’d stay locked in my room, dreading coming out lest I run into my boss in his pajamas or worse.

I was miserable and asked about my apartment every day until finally, one was procured for me. However, J informed me, quite nonchalantly, that the firm would not be paying for my apartment after all. And the car? That wasn’t happening either. The meal vouchers he’d promised me? No, they couldn’t make that happen; sorry. And the fair pay? Also not going to happen. I was not paid enough to live on. My monthly rent consumed almost my entire paycheck, so I ended up with about $250 per month to live on in a very expensive city.

Here’s part of an email I wrote to my parents a few weeks after starting my job and moved into my own place: 

The apartment is still more expensive than I had bargained for. Now I have to pay for my utilities, which J assures me is cheap (under 100 R a month) but STILL. I almost started crying when [the office manager] told me that — I didn’t though, don’t worry Dad — because honestly. One thing after another. PLUS they require a 1000 R deposit, which of course the office is deducting from my pay, so in August I will only get paid 600 R. Ummm yes. And I haven’t even gone grocery shopping yet or bought myself a towel for the gym, although the flat has some old ratty ones in the closet. I know we will be able to cover all this and I shouldn’t get so worked up about stuff but it really drives me nuts that [the firm] thinks it’s ok to not adjust my pay when they know I don’t have enough to live on. J said in the elevator just now that he would see what he could do, and he thought maybe [managing partner] might give me a raise later on if I proved myself to be a good worker. I guess we’ll see. 

After being at the office for three months, I found out that my bosses were paying a male trainee (a similar position to mine) significantly more than me. I wrote my mom and told her about a conversation I’d had with the male trainee (let’s call him P):

P asked how much they were paying me, and I told him, and he was like, Wow, and I thought they paid ME nothing. So it turns out they paid him significantly more than me (I think like $2500 reais a month), for the same position. Should I bring this up assuming they decide to extend my contract? Because it seems entirely unfair that they should pay me so much less than they paid him for doing the same job… I am presuming it is because he is male. There is a very Boys Club attitude in the office, despite the fact that all the Brazilian lawyers here are female. There is no question that [managing partners] run the place, and they are very Old School with regards to gender, esp. [main managing partner]. Like remember when he interviewed me and was all put out that he couldn’t see me in the videoconference? Because it mattered to him what I looked like in his decision about whether or not to hire me! Anyway what do you think about the salary issue? It kinda pisses me off, esp. since I had a meeting with [office manager] the other day in which she informed me that I still “owe” the office and they won’t be paying me full salary till next month. Long story… oh and she tried to totally f*ck me over by saying that they were going to subtract my meal tickets from my salary, as if we hadn’t been over that before. I put my foot down with her and said that that was NOT the understanding, and she backed off and said, ok, ok, we’ll give you the meal vouchers. I mean, for Pete’s sake. I am trying not to obsess about money but I just feel like I am getting jerked around here. It’s a matter of principal more than of money at this point, because I understand that I am essentially paying for the experience of being here, but they shouldn’t be able to keep me as an indentured servant, you know?

My work life was miserable. I was constantly worried about money and my job performance. To try to save money, I would walk to and from work, over a mile along busy, sidewalk-less São Paulo streets. When a receptionist in the office found out I was doing this, she scolded me, saying that I could get robbed or even murdered and that I had to pay for a taxi instead, fim. I grudgingly agreed. Taxis were expensive and took forever in the brutal São Paulo traffic. I would watch the meter tick up and up and feel like I was watching my money trickle away.

I knew I was being treated unfairly but I was afraid to advocate for myself too strongly lest I be shipped back home, jobless. This was the headspace I was in when J started making inappropriate comments to me. One time, he asked me when I usually went to the gym. I told him I went in the morning. He said he would have to start going in the morning, too, so he could see me in workout clothes. “I bet you look really good in shorts,” he said. Gross. Another time, he said he was going to have a barbecue at his house and I could come, if I promised to wear my bikini.

Things got worse when one of my best friends came to visit me in Brazil. I was allowed to bring her as my guest to a fancy firm dinner, and we were excited to drink wine and eat steak with important lawyers from all over the firm. J made sure he sat next to my friend and hit on her mercilessly throughout the dinner. At one point, he told her, loudly enough for me to hear, “If you were my girlfriend, you’d eat steak every day.” She was 23; he was in his mid-thirties and divorced. Also, as a reminder: HE WAS MY BOSS. Later that night, J and another attorney invited themselves back to my apartment. The other attorney was married, and I saw him slip off his ring as he sat on my couch. They tried to make my friend and I dance with them. We were embarrassed and wanted them to leave. We finally got rid of them but not before the married guy tried to kiss my friend.

Then, my cousin came to visit. J invited us over to his apartment for a cocktail, and we went. While I stepped out of the room to go to the bathroom, my boss grabbed my cousin’s rear. When I came back into the room, she told me we needed to leave, right then, so we did. When she told me what he had done to her, I was livid. But I felt like I couldn’t say anything to him without risking my job, so I didn’t. Instead, I apologized to my cousin for putting her in that situation, and fumed privately, resenting him for being such a dickhead in every possible way while having so much power over my circumstances.

I worked in that office for nine months before I quit. I haven’t spoken to J in years. He is now pretty high up in the Virginia state government. Very accomplished. Very lauded. He ran for Virginia State Senate a few years back and lost (ha). I’m sure he’ll try again. I wonder how many of his female employees and volunteers and supporters he’s mistreated over the years. Probably a lot. And you know what? He’s just one small-fry example of this type of bullshit. He might not have the power of a Harvey Weinstein or a Roy Moore, but he certainly had a lot of sway over my life for the nine months that I was his (underpaid, harassed, fraudulently contracted) employee. The truth is, he’ll probably never face consequences for being a dirtbag. But I sure feel better for having written this. 

Sound Advice Thursday: Should I go to law school?

June 6, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Dear Steph,

I just finished my junior year of college. I wanted to reach out to you to ask about your experience with law school and with law as a career. I get that you didn’t find law as a career to be particularly rewarding — could you elaborate a bit? I’ve always had law school in the back of my mind as a main post-grad option, but I’ve increasingly become skeptical that it’s the right path for me after reading insights like yours. I find it really inspirational that you left law to write. 

Sincerely,

Law School or Bust?

Dear LSOB,

This is a question I’ve gotten many times, in some form, over the years, even before I ever left the law to pursue writing, and I always wonder how to phrase my answer (which basically boils down to: “don’t go to law school unless you have a REALLY good reason”) while still getting across the fact that I actually really liked law school. So let me take a crack at it here.

First, I’ve written before on this blog about my experience of law school in the context of being a woman at Harvard Law School, and I blogged about my time in law school on my old blog (here, for example, and here). If you don’t feel like reading my archives, the basic gist is that I (mostly) loved law school. There were things about it that were highly annoying (see, e.g., 90% of the people), and three years of studying/writing papers could get monotonous (as I illustrated here), but mostly, I really enjoyed it. Law school, for me, was often intellectually engaging, challenging, and, turns out, fun.

No, seriously, I REALLY liked law school. Steph, circa October 2006.

No, seriously, I REALLY liked law school. Steph, circa October 2006.

Keep in mind, however, that I was in law school from 2006-2009 and I secured a job with a firm before the economy completely went to hell, so when I graduated, I was looking at a completely different job landscape than kids who are graduating from law school now (turns out that law graduates are now experiencing a “jobs crisis,” even graduates from top law schools). My experience was also helped by the fact that I was not gunning to be a Supreme Court clerk, so I made time for clinicals that interested me, language classes, salsa dancing, cooking, and hanging out with my now-husband, all of which helped to make my three years at HLS feel fun and easy. If I had been chained to my desk, trying to get on law review or trying to get all A+’s, I might be singing a different tune right now.

So here’s my first big piece of advice about law school: don’t go unless you’re POSITIVE you want to be a lawyer and know exactly WHY you want to be a lawyer. This is what I used to tell Harvard undergrads when I was in law school and was a pre-law tutor at one of the colleges. I’d beg these kids to please please please please not look at law school as a “fall-back” option. There are many reasons why law school is probably the absolute worst choice for a post-undergrad fall-back option, including the huge expense, the crazy debt you will probably rack up, the dwindling job market for lawyers (see the frightening Atlantic article cited above, and this article about how almost half of 2011 law grads can’t afford a house), and the fact that MANY people who go to law school end up not liking either law school or the practice of law (or both).

Consider that if you get a job after graduation (which is no longer a guarantee), there’s a decent chance you’ll go to work at a firm. Which means billable hours. Which means, unless you really love what you’re working on, your life is not going to be much fun, especially when you’re first starting out. Sure, I have friends from law school who are the kind of lawyers who go to court and get to say “Your Honor” and “may I approach the bench” and stuff, but they are the exceptions. The vast majority of my friends work at corporate law firms and have terrible, soul-crushing hours. Just like I used to! And the only way to make those soul-crushing hours worth it is if you’re doing something you care about. Period. Otherwise, life’s too short.

This probably won't be your life.

This probably won’t be your life.

This might be.

This might be.

As you’ve gathered, being an attorney was most definitely not my cup of tea. I did it for three years and then I got out, and I’m approximately 1000% happier now. The lesson here for you is that it’s possible to go to law school and hate being a lawyer, and vice versa. This doesn’t mean I regret going to law school. I enjoyed it, plus it was the right (and well-reasoned) choice for me at the time. I happened to have a crisis of disillusionment with what I was doing (human rights law) midway through my time at HLS and switch horses midstream, which contributed to me ending up at a law firm, which I hated, so there are lots of individual circumstances that affected my experience both as a law student and as a lawyer.

Here comes my second piece of general advice: WORK for a year or two once you’ve graduated college, rather than going straight to law school. Save some money, experience life a little bit, and then reevaluate and see if law school is still something you’re interested in. You can even do what I did, which is to apply to law school when you’re in college and have easy access to professors for rec letters, etc., and then just defer for a year or two if you get in. But really, I think it’s better to just apply to law school when you think you want to go. Everyone I knew at HLS who had taken more than a year off before law school (including my husband, who took three years off between college and law school) was happier, better adjusted, and more focused, because they tended to have entered into law school with clear ideas about what they wanted to do post-graduation.

If you think law school is something that you’d really like, and you’re sure you want to be a lawyer and have a type of law in mind that you think you’d like to practice, I’d strongly recommend working as a paralegal first and getting a sense for what the lawyers’ lives are like and what the work is like. If you can work as a paralegal in the type of practice area you’re interested in, all the better. I worked as a paralegal for a year in Brazil before going to law school, but the horribleness of the lawyers’ lives/work didn’t dissuade me because I wasn’t planning on working in a firm after graduation (but, guess what — I did end up at a firm, anyway. Oops!).

When all is said and done, whether or not to go to law school is an individual decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly. The best thing you can do for yourself right now is to sit down and consider what actually makes you happy.  What do you enjoy doing? What interests you? Do your skills and interests match up to a realistic/attainable job within the law? There’s no rush here, so take your time, think it through, and then make the most informed decision you can make.

Best of luck,

~Steph

 

 

Sexism and trolling

April 11, 2013 / / 2 Comments

I wrote a piece yesterday reacting to what struck me as a completely bogus op-ed in the Wall Street Journal hypothesizing that women at Harvard Law School (“HLS”) don’t perform as well as men because Harvard has lower admission standards for women. I am not going to link to that crackpot article again because I don’t want to give the author any more page views than I already have. It occurred to me after I wrote the piece that by responding to the WSJ article, I was feeding into exactly what the author wanted: attention. I reacted to a patently outrageous statement he made, thereby bringing traffic to his site. The author, my friends, is a classic troll.

For those of you who are new to the Internets, a “troll,” according to Wikipedia, is “someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” The author of the WSJ post is undeniably a troll. And so are his many readers who flocked to my blog to tell me that I am stupid and wrong and a woman and stupid and wrong. Oh yes, the trolls were out in full force yesterday. So let’s talk trolling, shall we?

No, not this kind.

No, not this kind.

I woke up this morning, read through several insulting comments I received on my blog, perused an article written by a woman I’ve never met impugning my analytical skills (yet offering zero analysis of what I had said in my piece), and felt deflated. It wasn’t that the trolls had convinced me that I was, in fact, stupid, but it was just the fact that there are so many people out there whose first reaction to a piece that they don’t agree with is to launch ad hominem attacks on its author. Rather than engaging with my piece on its level, these people chose to attack me – my intellect, my work ethic, my understanding of statistics, my imagined political agenda – and that’s disappointing. I don’t know why I expect better from strangers on the internet, but I do, perhaps because I wouldn’t dream of going on someone’s personal blog and calling them an idiot because I didn’t agree with something they said. I also would never presume to know about someone’s personal experience if I hadn’t lived it myself.

Not only did these commenters jump on me, but they did it in a particularly gendered way, which is heaped in several layers of irony, given that I had written a post about my experiences as a woman at Harvard Law School, and the principal reaction from the trolls seemed to be: a) sexism doesn’t exist, b) you’re clearly hysterical for even suggesting that it does, and c) you need to accept that women are dumber than men, and any disagreement with that proposition signals that you’re a dumb broad who needs to be shut up. Here are some actual comments I received (not all of them appear on the blog because I started trashing comments that were insulting to me):

“You have a lot of passion, which is commendable, but passion without control and diligence is blind.”

“I was unsure about the WSJ piece before reading your response, but now I’m much more confident admissions standards are lower for women.”

“Sadly, Ms. Green’s response does little to bolster anyone’s opinion of the analytical skills possessed by at least one female HLS grad.”

“You are countering all logic with hyper-emotional political correctness (and when that political correctness fails to win an argument, you are countering it with the old ‘not sure how that’s relevant’). Good grief.”

“Perhaps there would be more female cum laudes and Supreme Court clerks if HLS made more of an effort to screen out students such as yourself who look good on paper but aren’t willing to put in the proverbial 110%?”

These comments all fall into one of the three buckets I mentioned above, but can basically be summarized as: “YOU’RE HYSTERICAL.”

Regarding the first comment, in particular, which contends that I have “passion without control and diligence,” my clever friend Seth responded with the following: “He/she may have a good point. I mean, how have you really demonstrated control and diligence? Merely by high achievements in high school leading to an offer from a college with a low acceptance rate, excelling there and on a difficult standardized test where you most likely were >2 sd above the mean, and then completing three rigorous years at a world-renowned law school which prompted this whole conversation? I mean, I think it’s gonna take a *-*little*-* more than 20+ years of academic excellence to really rate a high score on what, i’m sure, is a very well validated and unbiased instrument to assess control and diligence that the commentator/commentatrix (it’s a word, shut-up) is using.”

Ha!

I really don’t feel the need to justify myself or my choices to these people. They’re trolls. They live under dark Internet bridges and dance for joy when people like me come down to play with them, and I’m not doing it. But, as a human being with emotions, it is a bit of a shock to the system to read one insult after another from complete strangers. But what can you do? Some people are asshats and will always be asshats, and there’s nothing I can say or do to change that. C’est la vie.

I will say, though, that the older I get, and the more bull-crap like this that I encounter on the Internet, the more of a feminist I become. I was lucky enough to grow up in an environment where I never thought much about my gender or how it related to my performance in school or my career options. Both of my parents are successful, educated people and they never made a big deal out of my gender. They just believed in me, encouraged me, and pushed me to do my best. And I did. It wasn’t until adulthood, when I started encountering jerks like the author of the WSJ piece and his minions, that I realized that gender discrimination actually is a problem that I should be concerned with, because there are so many people who genuinely believe that women are less capable or less intelligent than men. Honestly, I never thought that people thought this way until they started coming out of the woodworks to let me know how stupid they think I am. The realization that there are people who think I’m dumb, no matter how many prestigious schools I attend or degrees I rack up, was shocking at first, but now I’ve come to accept it as reality. As I’ve engaged more and more with the Internet over the years, blogging and posting on social media, I’ve been subjected to more and more attacks on my intellect by virtue of my gender (remember this?). It’s eye-opening, to say the least.

I suspect that a man who goes out of his way to travel to someone’s personal blog to post uninformed personal attacks on the author is broadcasting more about himself and his own insecurities than he is about the author. Someone who is secure in his own intellect does not feel the need to denigrate someone else’s intelligence. The tired lament that men are somehow subjugated by women’s success – or women’s desire for success – is pitiful, really. What kind of man whines that he is being disadvantaged by women wanting to do better? Pathetic! So I suppose we should all feel sorry for these guys and send them positive, healing vibes through the Internet tubes… But in the meantime, I’m going to keep trashing their comments.

Suck it, trolls.

Women at Harvard Law School

April 10, 2013 / / 29 Comments

I’m a graduate of Harvard Law School (Class of 2009, last class to have letter grades, represent!), but day to day, I don’t think about my experiences at law school much, now that I’ve completely stepped away (/ run screaming) from the practice of law.

hls grad

Over the last week, though, two separate things have made me think critically about my time at Harvard Law School (“HLS”). The first was an interaction I had with a woman who is preparing to leave her lucrative consulting job to go to HLS, not because she wants to be a lawyer but because she thinks it will be an “interesting academic experience” (hint: I think this is a bad idea), and the second was this article in the Wall Street Journal, which a male classmate of mine from HLS posted on his Facebook page, inviting comment from his female HLS friends. I read the article and I had a lot of, um, feelings about it, but I wasn’t sure how to articulate them. So I sat on it for a day and I still felt those same feelings (anger, frustration, righteous indignation), so I thought I’d take a crack at responding to the article here.

First, for those too lazy to read the WSJ article, it was responding to this video produced by the Harvard Women’s Law Association (“WLA”), entitled “Shatter the Ceiling,” which discusses the fact that women, by traditional measures such as numbers of cum laude graduates per year and Supreme Court clerkships obtained, do not perform as well as men at HLS. The video includes interviews several female faculty members and students and they speculate on why it might be the case that women at HLS don’t do as well as their male counterparts. I watched the entire video and much of it rang true to me. Did I agree with every single thing that was said? No. (See, e.g., the student claiming that women are being “silenced” at HLS). But overall, I thought the video was thoughtful and hit on important issues that we should probably be thinking about in a larger conversation about how law school should evolve in order to produce better (and perhaps even happier) lawyers.

The WSJ article, however, calls the video “offensive” and harps on a metaphor offered in the video by one female faculty member, Lani Grunier, likening women at law school to canaries in a coal mine. She said:

“So I think what I would say to you is probably captured by the miners’ canary metaphor–that the women in law school are the canary in the coal mines. So they’re more vulnerable when the atmosphere in the coal mines gets toxic. The canary, because of its different respiratory system, is more likely to start gasping for air, and that’s a sign that the atmosphere is toxic not just for the canary but for the miners as well. So it’s a signal to evacuate.”

The author of the WSJ article, who is apparently quite literal minded, finds this metaphor terribly offensive – how dare this woman compare female students to birds! – and goes on to conclude that, rather than representing a systemic imbalance, female students’ failure to thrive at HLS signals instead that HLS is admitting women who simply aren’t smart enough to keep up with the men. Now who’s being offensive, WSJ?

Let's tell some truth about HLS here.

Let’s tell some truth about HLS here.

I read the WSJ article twice, thinking it was perhaps meant to be tongue-in-cheek, and determined that, in fact, it was not. I got hung up both times on this part:

“The WLA’s hypothesis is discrimination against women. Our hypothesis is discrimination in favor of women. We suspect that in an effort to maintain a near-even sex ratio, Harvard Law holds female applicants to lower standards than male ones.”

First of all, this is the first I’ve heard about Harvard’s struggle to maintain a near-even sex ratio. We’ve all heard over the last five to ten years about how women outperform men in college; even the New York Times wrote about it. So certainly there’s no shortage of qualified female applicants to law school, and surely Harvard isn’t so hard up for women that they’re admitting dummies to make up the quotas.

Secondly, the idea that women at HLS are just dumber than their male counterparts is not only offensive, but also, based on my three years of attending the school, markedly untrue. Let me give you an example from my own experience. Both my husband and I went to HLS; we overlapped for one year and he graduated two years after me, in 2011. I happen to have gotten a higher LSAT score than him (although I’m not sure he knows that – hi, honey), but by most measures, he performed much better than I did at law school. Sure, his graduating class didn’t have the dreaded letter grades that we had, but our experiences were largely the same in terms of challenging coursework, clinicals, journals, etc. The WSJ would look at his cum laude diploma and my plain diploma and conclude that the reason he did better was because Harvard had lowered its standards by admitting me, the dumb girl. But if anything, I looked better on paper than my husband when we each applied to law school, at least in terms of raw numbers. And I suspect this is true for quite a few women at HLS: they were superstars in college or grad school, they’re brilliant thinkers and writers, they are competitive and accustomed to success, but something about the environment at HLS makes them wilt a little. In other words, the problem is with HLS, not with the women. I am struggling to understand why the WSJ finds this proposition offensive. Is it because it admits that women at HLS don’t do as well as men? We have the numbers in front of us. We can see that that’s the case. Or is it because it raises uncomfortable implications about the direction that HLS needs to move in order to guarantee that all of its students – not just half – perform to the best of their abilities?

In the WLA video, some of the women suggest that perhaps the Socratic Method is to blame, that the preferred method of instruction at HLS has a disparate impact on women. I think there could be some value to that hypothesis. I definitely spoke less frequently at HLS than I did in my college classes, and I think I developed some of that reticence to speak after being told, in no uncertain terms by the professors and sometimes by other students, that I was Wrong, with a capital W. I never would have believed this before law school, but I think there is something about the way women are socialized — to second-guess ourselves, to qualify our assertions by tacking on “I think” or “I could be wrong” or “maybe” — that is especially vulnerable to the black-and-whiteness of the Socratic smack-down. But I don’t think that’s the whole issue. Besides, I actually enjoyed my super-Socratic classes, and my proudest achievement at HLS — and I’m going to unabashedly brag here a little bit because I still can’t believe it actually happened — was snagging an A+ in a scarily Socratic constitutional law class. So we can’t put all the blame on the Socratic method itself, although I think it might be worth examining the way that the method is implemented, particularly by male professors.

Indeed, as disturbing as it is to talk about, there’s a fair amount of residual sexism hanging around the hallowed halls of HLS, and it often reveals itself in the ways professors treat their students. I had one professor in particular who was notorious for calling on men and ignoring women in his lectures. Even his tone when he spoke to female students was different: condescending, impatient, annoyed. We all noticed it, even the male students. Then, this professor made his preference official by emailing a select portion of the class at the end of our first year and letting these students know that he’d be happy to write them recommendation letters. Guess what? These lucky stars were almost ALL male. I think he extended his invitation to one woman, out of a class of about forty women! I was shocked when this happened – and grossed out and angry and frustrated. This professor’s actions sent sent a signal to all of his female students who had just slogged their way through their first year of law school: you’re not the rising stars here. Embrace the mediocrity.

And that was one of the weirdest things for me about HLS. I went from being a very high academic achiever to being, with the exception of a few classes, pretty mediocre. I was a solid A-/B+ kind of girl. My grades started to improve as time went on, creeping more frequently into the A range, but the truth was, I wasn’t that upset about not being at the top of my class. I guess I wasn’t willing to make the sacrifices that being at the top of the class requires at HLS. After all, I wasn’t trying for a Supreme Court clerkship or any clerkship at all. I wanted to enjoy myself, to go salsa dancing and to parties and to cross-register for Portuguese classes at the College. I wasn’t willing, as some of my classmates were, to hole up on weekends to outline cases or read secondary sources that weren’t assigned by the professor. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to succeed at law school, but I also wasn’t willing to become a bloodthirsty competitor, Paper Chase-style, to make it happen. I wonder if I knew deep down, even then, that a career in the law wasn’t the right path for me, and that I’d look back on my time at HLS with fondness, glad that I took the time to make friends, attend parties, go to the gym, and take trips. How much did those choices have to do with my gender? I don’t know. But I’m glad I had the experience I did.

In any case, we can’t all be Supreme Court clerks. And maybe not all of us want to be. But we all want to succeed, and I think Harvard should take a long, hard look at the reasons women aren’t succeeding as they should (hint: the answer is not “women are dumb”).

What do you guys think?

Drudgery

December 7, 2012 / / 1 Comment

“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
-Logan Pearsall Smith

I saw this quote the other day and it spoke to my little writer’s soul.  Isn’t it the truth?  You know that you’re meant to do a job if you can stand the mind-numbing tedium that comes with it.  And let’s face it — every job includes some dose of mind-numbing tedium.  I bet even an exciting job like being an astronaut comes with a fair amount of boring nonsense.  I mean, I bet astronauts have to do a lot of paperwork.

I should have known early on that I wasn’t cut out for law firm work when I found myself dreading even the non-tedious work involved in my job.  In fact, a weird inversion would happen at the lowest points of my tenure as a Big Law attorney wherein I’d look forward to the more tedious, less demanding tasks given to me (making PowerPoint slides, say, or reviewing documents) while facing more challenging assignments with white knuckles and gritted teeth, because I usually found them both difficult and dreadfully boring.  An assignment that is both hard and tedious really is the worst of both worlds, isn’t it?

Of course, I always did what I was asked to do and I’d like to think I performed adequately, but did I enjoy the process? Dear God, no.  I hated every minute of it.  Working at a law firm — both the drudgery and the brainwork — was an entirely miserable experience for me that often clouded my enjoyment of life.  Now, you might think I’m being a tad dramatic here, but no — something about the firm managed to spark some real Dark Night of the Soul-style existential wrangling for me.  Never did I fall to my knees and cry out, “Is this all there is, God?” because, you know, that would have been a little over the top, but, to be fair, I did cry in my office a lot.

It’s not just me who feels this way, by the way.  Sure, my hate for that particular job was probably more vehement than most of my colleagues’, but I’d venture to say that very few of the lawyers I encountered at my law firm genuinely loved what they did.  Many of us came to a firm in the first place because we had debt or we were trying to save money or we wanted to get training or we needed to have something prestigious on our resumes.  But the number of people who woke up looking forward to their workdays was quite small.  And almost no one I knew enjoyed the drudgery.  And oh, the sheer drudgery of being an attorney!  It’s indescribably dreary.

Now that I’m writing for a living, the Logan Pearsall Smith quote, above, makes perfect sense to me.  Some context: Smith was an essayist and critic who was known to take days to perfect a sentence.  (He also came up with some awesome quotes). So the guy clearly had a fondness for the drudgery of writing.  And gosh darn it, so do I.  Don’t get me wrong, writing is hard and it takes an effort, even as self-disciplined as I am, to make myself sit down and write 2000 words a day in my novel and then crank out a daily blog post.  But even when it’s a struggle, I enjoy it.  There’s something satisfying about gritting through, forcing my brain to shape words, digging ideas out of the attic of my subconscious.  And maybe the glow of writing will wear off eventually – after all, I’ve been doing this full-time for less than two months — but I don’t think so.  I think this is my vocation, as Smith would have it.  And so far I’m loving the drudgery.

Stephanie’s no good very bad week

October 20, 2012 / / 2 Comments

So, uh, I’m moving to South Africa in four days.

I know.

And I’m completely unprepared.

Guys, I know.

The (abridged) backstory: my husband (Al) works for a great company that has a Global Rotation Program that allows employees to work in two of the company’s many offices for six to nine months each.  Al applied last year and was accepted (hooray!) and we decided to do nine months in Joburg and nine months in London. I’ve written about the decision process and my feelings on it here.  Suffice it to say it was sort of a fraught decision but I’m feeling good about the move and even better about my decision to quit my terrible, toxic law firm job and become a professional writer.

Anyway.  It’s really happening now.  Stuff is getting real.  But as I sit here, four days out from boarding a flight to Johannesburg, I feel woefully unprepared for this move.  I haven’t packed half of our appliances, I have a load of laundry that needs doing, I don’t have enough boxes for the rest of our stuff (and why do we have so many novelty hats?), and I ran out of bubble-wrap before I could wrap up all of our wine glasses and ceramic mugs.  Oy.

I couldn’t really pack before this because I was busy suffering through a comically terrible last two weeks of work and I had little time for anything other than crying in my office.  See, Al left for Joburg two weeks ago but I had decided to stay on a couple extra weeks at work because of a big filing deadline for one of my cases.  So there I was, in DC, working bonkers hours to try to get this brief filed, when I started feeling sick.  Really sick.  I had a terrible headache, body aches, joint pain, chills, fever, and sharp abdominal pains, and I completely lost my appetite. I went to the doctor and — long story short! — I had typhoid fever.

Yup.

I’ll spare you the gory details but my last week of work was truly hellish, and not just because I was dealing with a disease that you contract from eating or drinking something contaminated with human feces.  Oh, wait, I guess I didn’t spare you the gory details at all. Well… real talk. Deal with it.

The point is, I don’t recommend working at a law firm. It’s TERRIBLE. Worse than typhoid! And I should know!  Actually, typhoid fever is a pretty useful metric for deciding on the horribleness of any given thing. For example: Drinking a frosty eggnog with rum > watching a baseball game with beer > getting a stubbed toe > watching a baseball game with no beer > having typhoid fever > working at a law firm.

Anyway, I’m better now (thank you, Cipro) and I really do need to pack.

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