Yet, mothers alone are penalized. It's not hard to see why. Many professional women were forced to make tremendous sacrifices to have children or made the ultimate sacrifice and remained childless. Taking the bar may seem to them to be a small price to pay. There seems to be an underlying feeling that grueling, stressful schedules, missed soccer games and parental guilt are a rite of passage to success in the legal profession.
Many male lawyers are loath even to take family leave for fear of hurting their careers.
At the other end of the spectrum are women who don't have the luxury of taking any time off when they have a child, except the minimal six to eight weeks of family leave offered by most employers. It has been more than a year and people ask me why I don't just take the bar exam. Meanwhile, the only woman on Indiana's five-member Supreme Court resigned and a male was appointed by the governor to take her place, making the state's highest court all male. The domestic violence clinic proposal fell through because I could not supervise students without first being licensed to practice in Indiana. Now that my child is entering first grade, I am looking for a more traditional job.