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Home Blog contract attorney More on the “Mommy Lawyer” Debate

More on the “Mommy Lawyer” Debate

August 7, 2010

For those who enjoyed our prior blog post, Laywer or Mom: Choose Only One? MLG Says “No.”, check out the recent article A Labor Market Punishing to Mothers by David Leonhardt.  It discusses the fact that women have come a long way in the workforce, but states that “Women do almost as well as men today, as long as they don’t have children.”  Alana K. Bassin of The Legal Divas Blog wrote a great post about this article, so we thought we’d refer you to her blog: Mommy Lawyer: Still Closer to an Oxymoron Than the Truth.  Alana is a partner at a large law firm and has 4 children, and provides some honest insight about the difficulty of making partner when a female associate already has children, and why she was able to succeed.   Here are some interesting quotes from her blog post:

I further was and continue to be willing to make sacrifices that others are not. I always worked through my maternity leave – not necessarily full time but I treated every day like a work day…. 

I often say that I never could have made it if I had kids earlier when there is a different expectation about face time and a person has to answer to partners in the office according to their schedules. I recently wondered how one of our new associates was managing three kids and being a first year associate. She just gave notice she was leaving….

There are 5 senior women partners in our firm (I do not even count myself as one of them). Two do not have children, one has one child but she waited until she was already a partner, and the remaining two had kids prior to making partner. Of the two that had kids at a younger age, one only has one child (not that this still isn’t incredibly tough to manage), and the other has 4… 

Flexible hours, part-time etc., these things help, but they won’t solve everything (including that it will likely take you longer to get where you are going). Perhaps recognizing the issue will help the battle….

Thanks for the great post.  Like Alana’s title says, “Mommy Lawyer” is still probably closer to an oxymoron than the truth when the mother works in a law firm, but we hope “Mommy Lawyers” continue to look for other options like freelance/contract legal work and part-time work.  And the debate continues…

Filed Under: contract attorney, female attorney, freelance, mommy lawyer, mother lawyer, part-time attorney

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