GIRL ATTORNEY, LLC – Page 36 – Community, Networking, & Education for Women Attorneys in the U.S.

“It’s the college ranking season and especially if you’re a prospective college student or a parent, these shorthand markers of a school’s quality, value, and – let’s face it – prestige, are a big deal.

They’re also a big deal to the University of California system I lead. We do a lot of celebratory horn blowing around this time of year.

On the latest Forbes top colleges list, for example, the University of California, Berkeley is the highest ranked public university campus in the nation, and five other UC campuses – UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, and UC Irvine – are in the top 22. Forbes also ranked UCLA as this year’s Number 1 Best Value School. All of this is the social media equivalent of a loud “woo-hoo!”

The excitement over college rankings, and the proliferation of such lists themselves, certainly speaks to the importance of higher education in the public mind. It’s hardly news anymore that a college education is a game-changer in achieving what we used to call the American Dream. U.S. Labor Department statistics show that overall, college graduates today earnroughly 98% more per hour than people without a degree.

Women, especially, have internalized the message that higher education pays. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, women make up more than 56% of college students nationwide.

But here’s the rub. Despite the tremendous educational gains that women have achieved, men still earn higher wages, virtually across the board. Since the Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963 – when women earned an average of 59 cents for every dollar paid to a man – the gender pay gap has narrowed by less than half a cent per year, to about 80 cents on the dollar today.”

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If co-working is the future, then it shouldn’t look like a frat house

From Quartz authored by Leah Fessler:

“If the future of work is happening in co-working spaces, it leaves a lot to be desired for women

Not a single co-founder or board member at WeWork, Industrious, or Rocketspace, some of the biggest coworking companies in America, is a woman. Unsurprisingly, this means that many of these spaces feel quite white, male, and techy. “The facilities were great, but it was all a ‘Move fast and break things’ culture,” said Priya Kubar, an Indian-American entrepreneur, of her early days working in male-dominated Bay Area coworking spaces. “I believe that sustained growth is only achievable if you have a balance in life.”

Community breeds on likeness, and in this context, much like Silicon Valley, likeness means white, cis, tech bros.

Various women’s only coworking spaces have launched as alternatives to the status quo. Take The Wing, the all-women’s social and co-working club, which raised a $32 million Series B funding round in November 2017 (from WeWork) after earning its Series A of $8 million the previous April. The Wing has four locations in New York City and Washington DC, and is flocking to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, London, and Toronto soon. Men are not allowed, ever. There’s also The Assembly, San Francisco’s alternative to The Wing, which only allows female members, though men can come as guests.

According to Amy Nelson, founder and CEO of the Seattle-based coworking company, The Riveter, neither WeWork nor The Wing-style coworking spaces were sufficient. Though she experienced frequent sexism as a lawyer and political activist, Nelson knew she couldn’t do her job without interacting with men—nor did she want to block men out of her workspace. However, once she left law to become an entrepreneur, attending business classes at WeWork, Industrious, and Galvanize in Seattle, she knew she’d never thrive in community they cultivated.”

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Woman-led law firm launches Infant-At-Work Policy for employees

From Corp authored by Karen Dybis:

“Attorney Charissa Potts understands how it feels to be a working mom, especially because she is one herself. That is why she decided recently to launch a progressive employee Infant-At-Work policy for her law firm.

Freedom Law, which is based in Eastpointe, now has an Infant-At-Work policy that serves to support its part- and full-time employees as they become parents. The female-owned law firm seeks to provide a positive work environment for its employees, said Charissa Potts, founder and Principal Attorney for Freedom Law.

Potts said she believes that when a parent can stay with an infant the firm, the employee, infant, Freedom Law’s clients and all of society ultimately benefits.

“As a mom myself, I understand the connection a parent has with their child, especially in those all-important early months,” Potts said. ‘My aim is to retain talent and provide clients with the highest level of personalized service. We serve the whole person, and that means supporting parents in their new role.’”

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Kids Don’t Damage Women’s Careers — Men Do

From Medium authored by Jessica Valenti:

“One of the most pernicious modern myths about motherhood is that having kids will damage your career. Women are told that we need to choose between our jobs or our children, or that we’ll spend our most productive work years “juggling” or performing a “balancing act.”

For those of us uninterested in circus tricks, a bit of perspective: It’s not actually motherhood or kids that derail women’s careers and personal ambitions — it’s men who refuse to do their fair share.

If fathers did the same kind of work at home that mothers have always done, women’s careers could flourish in ways we haven’t yet imagined. But to get there, we need to stop framing mothers’ workplace woes as an issue of “balance,” and start talking about how men’s domestic negligence makes it so hard for us to succeed.

Yes, we know American men are doing more than they have in past years: Fathers report spending about eight hours a week on child care, or three times as much as fathers in 1965. (Though keep in mind that the data is self-reported, and men tend to overestimate how much domestic work and child care they do.)

Men doing more, however, is not the same thing as men doing enough. Despite progress made, mothers are still spending almost twice the amount of time that men do, 14 hours a week, on child care. And not all parenting is tangible, quantifiable work — it’s the mental labor of having kids that’s often the most taxing. It’s easy to split, for example, who packs a school lunch or dresses a child in the morning. But someone also needs to keep track of those days when lunch needs to be bagged for a field trip, or when it’s time to buy new underwear or sneakers. How many dads do you know who could tell you their child’s correct shoe size?

This kind of invisible work almost always falls on women, and we rarely talk about the impact it has on our professional lives. Imagine if instead of our mind being filled with to-do lists about grocery shopping and dentist appointments, we had available head space for creative thinking around our work and passions. For mothers, the freedom to just think is a privilege.”

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New Time Magazine Covers Show What It’s Like To Be A Teacher In America

From Scary Mommy authored by Cassandra Stone:

“It’s often said that teaching can feel like a thankless job. The new TIME magazine cover story series shows just how thankless being a teacher in America is — and the stories featured are a sobering reminder of how deeply we fail our country’s teachers, every single day.

High school history teacher Hope Brown donates plasma twice a week and regularly consigns her clothing to make ends meet. NaShonda Cooke, a middle school teacher in North Carolina, says she often skips doctor’s appointments to save on high co-pay costs and struggles to pay utility bills. The thing is — this is the daily reality for many teachers across the country. Living on meager salaries, shelling out crippling amounts of their own money for classroom supplies, and struggling to make ends meet. Even though they’re working full-time jobs and pulling in more hours than the average American worker, not to mention shaping the minds and lives of our youth.”

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In Interviews, Female CEOs Say They Don’t Expect Much Support — at Home or at Work

From Harvard Business Review authored by Andromachi Athanasopoulou, Amanda Moss Cowan, Michael Smets, & Timothy Morris:

“Women who have already made it to the top say that the only person who will get you there is yourself.

While many researchers and observers have examined the structural and other barriers that limit women’s progress through the ranks, we wanted to explore a different question: how have the few women who have made it to the very top overcome those barriers? Our aim was to discover how female CEOs explain their own success, and to develop recommendations for supporting women’s leadership careers more generally.

We embarked on an in-depth study of the leadership journey of 12 female CEOs, most of whom lead large, global corporations. This was part of a larger study on the same topic, covering a total of 151 global CEOs — 12 female and 139 male. According to Grant Thornton (2016), globally, only 9% of women in senior management are CEOs or managing directors. In the G7 just 7% of women in senior management are CEOs, compared to 20% who are HR Directors or 12% who are chief marketing officers. Our sample of female CEOs — 8% of the 151 CEOs we interviewed — is representative of this reality.”

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