The Complete Lawyer

Learn Lessons From The Past

As instructive as her story is for all women lawyers who are practicing today and are concerned about the state of the profession, many questions remain. Have the successful women of today let down not only Betty Roberts’ generation, but the emerging generation who still face significant hurdles? How do we combat the subtle and less overt discrimination and unexamined biases that remain today and pose an equally insidious challenge to women’s advancement? How should we confront the well-meaning efforts that nevertheless hold us back and have a negative impact on our careers?

Many women lawyers who are members of the baby-boomer generation spent so much time forging a solitary path to success that they lost sight of the big picture. Rather than seeking to eliminate barriers on behalf of all women—as earlier pioneers did—many looked inward, and did what was necessary to succeed, rather than extend a helping hand.

Ironically, younger women lawyers today frequently speak about their need for role models and mentors, and are sometimes disappointed by the lack of support and, even worse, an unwillingness to address directly women’s issues in the workplace. We now know, however, that these problems are not going away, and are in fact exacerbated by silence. With a clogged pipeline and a scarcity of women’s voices in critical leadership roles, we need a far more organized effort to succeed.

When Justice Roberts served as the first woman justice of the Oregon Court of Appeals, she was continually ignored by the Chief Judge during the Court’s deliberative conferences. She described her experience of exclusion this way: “The signal I was being sent . . . was loud and clear: being a judge was men’s work. . . . Their fear was that irrational. And it was up to me to modify myself in some way to alleviate their fear. If a woman is doing, ‘men’s work,’ then the woman must change in some inexplicable way to make her work acceptable to the men. The burden was clearly on me to do the impossible.”¹

She recognized that she was experiencing a “deep-seated, unconscious prejudice” ²that needed to be changed. To fight back, she began to speak up, inserting herself into the discussion, using her voice constructively, making clear that she would neither go away nor conform to an outworn image of what her male colleagues wanted her to be. Because of her excellence on the bench, she not only succeeded, but encouraged women to work for equal status for women as well.

Speak Out To Support Change

Our challenge is to achieve our goals by joining together for the benefit of the institutions in which we work and for the women entering the workplace. Justice Roberts hoped her experiences on the Court of Appeals would encourage others to speak openly: “So . . . we could all learn to deal with sexism when it occurs.”³

Betty Roberts’s book serves as an instruction manual for how women can take a leadership role to create a workplace where women can thrive and succeed. It’s time to work together to achieve the changes needed to create full equality in the workplace. By emulating the courage and activism of those before us, we will create a better workplace for our daughters.

RESOURCES

Betty Roberts with Gail Wells, With Grit and by Grace: Breaking Trails in Law and Politics – A Memoir, (Oregon: Oregon State University, 2008)