Blog 29 Minority Women in Law: Dealing with Harassment

Minority women who work in law firms must deal with the double identity jeopardy’s of race and gender which make it hard for many to stay with law firms. In fact, it was mentioned in the NPR video All Things Considered, August 3, 2006, that only 4% of law firm partners are minorities, and even less are women. One senior female partner explained that these young women react this way because in college and law school they were treated as equals, “They came up in an environment where they never had to put up with that crap. Now they are in that situation with a client of senior lawyer, and they’ve lost their bearings” (2003: 56). Many women just believe that it is not worth it to stick it while putting up with underlying and overt harassment in the workplace.

This creates a lack of influential leaders available for other minority women to follow in their footsteps. According to Shared Leadership: The Value Women Leaders Bring, when women first started flooding the workforce they believed if they acquired enough positions at the bottom they would eventually make it to the top but this has not happened. According to Deborah Rohde from the Does Gender Matter: Are Women Leaders Different video, this is due to the fact that those at the top will hire people who are like them, which results in white males hiring more white males. With this disadvantage in advancing in a company, along with harassment revealed by colleagues and also by clients and opposing attorneys, make it even more difficult for minority women tolerate for very long.

A woman described in English’s study (2003: 87) said that she had to give a deposition to one of her male counterparts because the opposing attorney’s underlying harassment was downright nasty and she would not put up with it. A black woman in the NPR clip mentioned having to deal with more overt harassment when she was asked to sit in at a meeting with a company that was ending its relationship with the firm because the firm did not employ enough minorities. They were parading her gender and race around to prove they were “diverse”, but under no other circumstances was she ever invited to sit in at other meetings. In order to create work environments that are in fact diverse and non-threatening to minorities and females, it is going to take resistance from within the firms and also from outside firms to demand equal rights and equal treatment.

English, H. (2003). Gender on Trial: Sexual Stereotypes and Work/Life Balance in
the Legal Workplace. New York: ALM Publishing.