Eye on the Blogosphere: Are younger professional women really that clueless?

By Taryn Hartman

Legal News

CATFIGHT!!

That usually sends people — and in this case, hopefully eyeballs — running. But it does headline a Blogosphere story from the last two weeks that’s made me want to take a closer look at legal women, how they behave and how they treat one another, and whether this is part of a vicious cycle that causes women attorneys to feel as if they’re constantly fighting for the success and respect enjoyed by their male counterparts.

Let me put it out there right off the bat that I’m aware this is a sensitive issue and my perspective is going to be very different from a lot of others because I’m not an attorney. That said, I welcome any and all feedback and personal stories surrounding the experience of being a woman attorney and hope that this starts a dialogue about how these issues play out in Metro Detroit and even on a national scale.

I’m well aware that the news items that hit the blog wires are usually pretty sensational (otherwise why would anybody read them, right?) and are by no means representative of all women in legal careers, but I do think they serve as useful microcosms for examining the state of women in the profession and whether that could be influenced by changes in behavior.

Let’s start with the catfight. Last week, an email originally sent by third-year Harvard law student Stephanie Grace last November was forwarded to Above the Law after it had been disseminated to the Black Law Students Association at Harvard and then to chapters across the country, purportedly because Grace’s words painted her as a racist.

Now, before we go any further, one thing about this story is that it has shades of the John Roberts retirement rumor we talked about here a little while ago: first the email comments grew out of a dinner hosted by the generally conservative Federalist Society; then it was just three friends having dinner in the campus dining hall. Then the BLSA chapters at different schools were banding together to try to get Stephanie’s federal clerkship with Alex Kozinski, chief of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California, yanked; then they weren’t. Above the Law founder David Lat wrote a great summary of this whole brouhaha on Monday; ATL also has the original email.

We all know there’s no such thing as a calm and measured response when we’re talking about the Blogosphere, so the scandal unfolded based on a context-free snippet of the email that read, “I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent,” and the number of rumors surrounding it, like those about the Federalist Society and BLSA. In the full email, she is fastidious about expanding on her point by citing academic studies and theories, hypothetically to make herself come across as NOT racist.

But that information wasn’t taken into account before her identity was revealed by Gawker (ATL had originally redacted Grace’s name from its initial post) and the law school’s dean, Martha Minow, got involved and issued a statement on April 29, two days after the email hit the Web.

And then it comes out that the genesis of all this was a recent fight between Grace and her friend Yelena Shagall, prompting Shagall to dig into her inbox archives — remember, the original email was sent in November — and forward Grace’s potentially damaging comments to the Black Students Law Association, although Shagall denied this to both ATL and Gawker. Even worse, the fight is apparently over a boy, specifically, “Stephanie confronted [Yelena] because Yelena had slept with a mutual friend’s ex-boyfriend,” according to Gawker.

So now both of these successful, high-achieving and apparently intelligent (they got into Harvard Law, after all, and a read of the full text of Grace’s original email reveals she’s pretty smart) girls’ names have been dragged through the mud of a culture that thrives on making snap judgments without having all the facts in front of it, and all because of some trivial high-school fight over a dude. I hope their surely promising careers aren’t ruined before they even begin, and if they in fact are, I hope it was worth it.

This story tells us several things, not only about the anatomy of a rumor but also about the intersection of technology and privacy; it only takes a mouse click for a personal email sent to two of our friends to go viral, and today’s teeming Blogosphere only assists in the further decimation of what we think of as private information.

But that’s another story. What I find really interesting about this is that it’s a clear example of the fact that girls are absolutely evil, especially to one another, and this case illustrates that it doesn’t stop after seventeen. I can’t help but think that if this is how two women on the cusps of their professional legal careers are treating one another, then that ethic must also carry over into law firms to some extent. Maybe one of the reasons women lawyers often struggle to succeed in what’s commonly called a good-ol’-boys environment is because they’re too busy stomping on each other’s necks to rally together in support of one another. Maybe women just can’t stand to see their female colleagues do well without feeling that they’re being slighted in some way.

There’s also been a lot of recent online chatter about how women lawyers should dress in the workplace that recently spilled over into our very own paper via Nicole Black’s column “Appropriate Attire for Women Attorneys.” If you missed it, it’s available at her own blog, one of the many.

I first caught wind of this topic in March when ATL’s Elie Mystal posted the headline, “Biglaw Women, Do You Even Know How to Use Make-Up?” about a “dressing for success” event planned exclusively for women by the City Bar of New York, an event that was cancelled the day after the post because of the outcry against it.

ATL editors Mystal and Kashmir Hill took opposing stances on the issue: male Mystal’s boiled down to “Why market a ‘fashion sense talk’ to women, while ignoring men? Why just assume that women, professional women, need be more concerned about their appearance than their male counterparts? We all know why. It’s because there is a huge double standard when it comes to the appearance expectations on women as opposed to men. I recognize that, but slathering make-up all over the problem doesn’t make it any prettier.”

The following day, Hill—a woman—countered with, “There are certain female issues—when it comes to dress and make-up—that men cannot relate to, so it does not strike me as outrageous that women would have their own event on these issues.”

Then the Chicago Bar Association went ahead and held a fashion show for lawyers last month, which was covered by some local bloggers for ATL and then got picked up on Jezebel, which has since started its own “Dress Code” series, including a missive on appropriate work attire.

Granted, the coverage of the event posted to ATL by bloggers Legally Fabulous and Attractive Nuisance was pretty tongue-in-cheek due to their pre-determined absurdity of the event, but some good/totally insane points about how women should dress came to light.

Attractive Nuisance, whose blog link is no longer functioning, noted that some of the very vague suggestions doled out included “wear flats, wear minimal jewelry, wear minimal makeup, do not wear hair in a pony-tail, do not wear hair down in a distracting way, wear pantyhose, do not wear open-toe shoes, do not wear peep-toe shoes, and do not wear dark nail polish,” specifically, for whatever reason, burgundy.

And also, “wear a shirt under your suit that is not too tight, not low-cut, not bright colored, not patterned, not ruffle-y, and not too feminine.” And “never wear boots, never show your arms, NEVER wear pink, never wear clothes that reveal your body shape, never wear clothes that reveal your tramp stamp, and never dress like a ‘sleazy girl’ which apparently means wearing a fitted pencil skirt and side ponytail.”

But my absolute favorite, which is in bold type on the ATL post and helps prove my earlier hypothesis, is “Oh, and do not wear your engagement ring if it is large because it may anger your women interviewers and cause jealousy (and perhaps rage).” It’s apparently impossible for women to be objective towards other women (in an interview setting, for example) without our biological need to rip our co-gender competitors to shreds getting in the way. Seriously? Women are supposed to worry about their engagement rings making other women jealous instead of spending their time and energy thinking about what they should be SAYING?

The very fact that these kinds of seminars are out there is evidence of some problems. Sure, there’s a double standard out there when it comes to how men and women should look and dress. That’s not just in the law, that’s in life. But that bar associations and other organizations feel they need to be holding them doesn’t come from their discipleship of Tim Gunn alone. It’s because there are women out there who are dressing in ways that necessitate them. Just last weekend a local lawyer told me about a receptionist she’d interviewed and started on a trial period who came in the very next day wearing a too-tight, midriff-baring ensemble with no sense whatsoever of its impropriety.

I’m typing this while sitting Indian-style in my desk chair, wearing distressed jeans, a gray football t-shirt and moccasins with no socks (my shoes are currently on the floor), so I’m not going to be the one doling out dressing-downs to non-wardrobe-savvy women. But my question remains: Why do women open the doors to this kind of criticism when it comes to presenting ourselves? Why is it apparently so difficult for us to figure out what constitutes office-appropriate attire and, for that matter, behavior? Are these conflicts more generational than gender-based? Or is it demeaning and trivial to even be talking about how women dress in the first place? I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts and reactions.