The February 2008 issue of ABA Journal reports these stats on the perceptions of women under 40.
I’ve heard female lawyers who went to law school in the 1990’s and afterwards say that they find their senior female colleagues “more demanding” than male counterparts and that senior female attorneys lack a certain spirit of sisterhood. Conventional wisdom blames these attitudes on the all-male environments that senior female attorneys pioneered, and their likely sense of, “My success was judged by male standards and so yours should be, too.”
I am curious about the perceptions reported by the ABA Journal. Do women in fact give worse directions or less helpful feedback than men do? Or are we perceived as doing so because women in positions of responsibility make many people – women and men alike – uncomfortable? Or are their other (or multiple) explanations?
-Bridget Crawford
