Women’s role in law growing

(Corrected, Dec. 4)
To highlight the increasingly significant role of women in the law, Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol is presenting a year-long series of seminars on “Women Who Lead,” which kicked off Oct. 29 with an address by Margaret H. Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts.
David A. Logan, dean of the law school and a law professor, said he proposed the series in part as a result of the discussions earlier this year regarding the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, discussions that involved heated debate over the role a judge’s life experience should play in rendering judicial decisions.
“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” Logan said, directly quoting an 1881 statement of the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. That’s a sentiment with which Logan fully agrees. “Deciding cases is not purely mathematical,” Logan said. “Judges make choices that are not all based upon a set of understandings in law books,” but bring a “rich array” of life experiences to the job.
Women on the bench “absolutely” can help open the door to wider acceptance of life experience in the law, Logan said. “And, by the way, it’s the life experience of half of our population,” he added, “so it seems particularly dumb not to want to have it on the bench. To imply that a woman’s life experience is the same as a man’s is foolish. It’s different, not better or worse, just different.”
Rhode Island Supreme Court Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg, who has been a judge for 19 years, pointed out that various groups underrepresented as judges can bring “so much dimension and depth to the bench,” such as members of minority groups, trial lawyers and women, especially in an appellate court. “Each constituency is very important,” she said, “but women sometimes cross so many of those dimensions.”
“More women are entering law school, but few become partners and few become judges,” Goldberg observed, “and yet, according to some, a woman’s perspective can only broaden and enrich the legal profession.” She has been “disappointed,” she said, by the slow pace of female appointments to the state’s Supreme Court and pointedly noted that two women who have been nominated for a current vacancy are “eminently qualified.” “I am hoping a woman joins our court,” Goldberg said, “but whoever is appointed will be welcome, of course.”
In general, according to legal experts, the number of women in law school today versus men is split down the middle at 50-50. At Roger Williams law school, the incoming class in 2007 was 47.4 percent male and 52.6 percent female; in 2008, 45.3 percent male and 54.7 percent female; in 2009, 53.3 percent male and 46.7 percent female. Sizes of the classes were 101, 99 and 98 students, in that order.
Susan A. Keller, a corporate lawyer and partner with the firm of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge in Providence, said few female lawyers are promoted because women tend to leave the profession before they gain the needed experience. Keller frequently mentors female attorneys new to the profession and she also has done considerable work in the area of lawyer retention and promotion.
The responsibility of taking care of a family, coupled with the rigorous demands of the profession, in terms of building a client base and amassing billable hours, are major reasons women leave, Keller said. “This is a population we need to foster and to create opportunities for,” she said, suggesting such workplace innovations as flex time and telecommuting help retain female lawyers.
The National Association of Women Lawyers, in an October report on the retention and promotion of women in law firms, found that only 6 percent of managing partners in law firms in the country were women.
Cynthia Thomas Calvert, deputy director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law and author of several books and articles on women in the law, is studying what she called “the hidden bias” involving female associates at law firms across the country. She spoke Nov. 10 at a Roger Williams’ “Women Who Lead” seminar. She and her colleagues studied 1,700 in-house performance evaluations done by a major law firm in the nation (which Calvert declined to identify). They found evidence that, if a male attorney has a success, it is likely to be attributed to his competence and skill, but when a female lawyer is successful, “it is often attributed to luck,” Calvert said.
The evaluations further showed that, if a male lawyer makes a mistake, it is easily forgotten. When a female lawyer makes a mistake, however, “it tends to be noticed more and remembered more,” Calvert said. “We saw this again and again in the evaluations, and it’s because women do not have the presumption of competence that men have. Women have to prove their competence over and over again.”
Asked how her gender contributes to her work as a lawyer, Victoria M. Almeida, president of the Rhode Island Bar Association and a partner with Adler Pollock & Sheehan in Providence, said her approach is to focus on building consensus, rather than winning or losing, a trait she sees in other female lawyers as well.
Women attorneys also “are very good at mentoring,” Almeida suggested, “and giving opportunities in a lateral way to others. Women are more willing to share the credit than men. I see that in most of the successful women I know. We also communicate better and we’re good listeners.” About 33 percent of the state bar association’s 6,700 members are women, she said, and, for the first time in the bar’s history, there will be two female presidents in a row. Almeida will be succeeded July 1 by Lise Iwon, who practices in Wakefield.
Other speakers in the “Women Who Lead” series will include: Angela Ciccolo, interim general counsel/secretary to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Patricia Wald, the first female judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. No dates have been set yet for these events. •
An earlier version of this article said Betty Anne Waters was a scheduled speaker in the “Women Who Lead” series, based on information provided by organizers. Her appearance has not been confirmed.