With the number of firms and litigation being disproportionately higher than the number of talented individuals in the market, what were previously seen as fringe benefits have started taking center stage in the battle to grab talent.  Other efforts, both on the federal, state, and private levels have helped the cause of working mothers and made life at least better than what it was before.

While Arnold & Porter was the first law firm in the Washington, DC, to provide a full time on-site day care center in 1995, law firms had been offering emergency back up care for attorneys and employees from 1988 with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering opening the first back up center.  In fact, within 1991, most law firms of any status in the DC area set up emergency day care through contractual service providers like Lipton Corporate Child Care Centers Inc. and similar companies.  Firms like Drinker Biddle & Reath; Fried Frank, Harris Shriver & Jacobson; Jones Day; Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; Arnold & Porter; Hogan & Hartson etc., to name a few, already have excellent day care facilities.  However, on site care facilities are still to gather momentum within the legal business arena.

At the end of March, Sara Lee Corporation named two law firms Sonnenschein Nath & Roselthal, LLP and Reed Smith, LLP, as preferred partners in the company’s diversity initiative.  Sara Lee’s diversity program focuses on women and minorities and is seen as a corporate model in the legal industry.  Now in its fifth year, the program monitors the efforts of law firms and awards the best with its Preferred Partner status.  Sara Lee analyzes every year, past data from its primary law firms focusing on the number of minorities and women in each firm, the firm’s attrition rates, its external recruiting and promoting of female and minority lawyers and the composition of its senior leadership.

While efforts like that of Sara Lee are commendable, the national scenery remains bleak for the working woman on most fronts.  While in UK from this month of April, the law allows up to 9 months paid maternity leave, things are still to get better on this side of the Atlantic.

The real problem, as stated by Nicole Buonocore Porter (in her work, “Re-defining superwoman: an essay on overcoming the “maternal wall” in the legal workplace” published in Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, March 22, 2006) is that working woman bounce off the “maternity wall” long before they reach the barrier of the “glass ceiling.”  As Porter says, and I concur, “the current definition of Superwoman no longer meets the needs of today’s working mother-attorneys.”  The continuous and daily shifting between the two social stereotypes: that of the highly intelligent, confident, ambitious, hardworking and dominant businesswoman, and that of the “submissive, dependent, selfless, nurturing, tidy, gentle, and unconfident housewife,” - takes its tolls.  Especially, in the types of businesses like law firms where “billable hours” make your life worthwhile, the long hours are inevitable and they work against the demands of maternity.

Nicole goes on to say, “I will address what I have learned from my years as a mother-attorney, as well as what I have learned from other mother-attorneys.”  What I am about to say may surprise some and anger others, but I believe it must be said.  The enemy is not the firm because the firm is simply acting in what it believes to be its best interests.  The enemy is our own guilt.  I am not sure why this is so, but it is apparent to me that women everywhere are taught to feel guilt much too easily.  Even when the stars align and everything is going well, we are apt to feel guilty about something.  I have no empirical support to back up this conclusion, but I suspect that many of the women reading this are nodding their heads in agreement….The problem, as I see it, is that women with children will always be torn between two conflicting roles: “mother of the year” and “superstar attorney.”

And Nicole’s solution is that you have it all when you redefine what “all” means to you.  You will end up burnt if you want to be “mother of the year” and “superstar attorney” at the same time.  But “If you are happy, your family is happy, and your firm is happy because you do great work (even if it is less work than other attorneys), then in my definition, you already are Superwoman.