A Seat at the Table: Bringing Four Pillars of Fourth Wave Feminist Strategies to the Legal Profession

Women have been graduating from law school at equal rates with men since the turn of the twenty-first century.We are hired for entry-level associate positions at nearly the same rate as men. Yet something happens along the way. By mid-career, our progress has sputtered or stalled out altogether. Despite decades of laws and policies designed to promote gender equity, women have not reached parity with men in compensation, promotion, or status in the legal profession. Most of us never make it to the top. We do not become equity partners in law firms, law school deans, Fortune 500 General Counsel, or Supreme Court law clerks, at nearly the same rate as our male peers. Some of us have chosen to sacrifice our personal lives, working twice as hard and twice as long to compete in a male-dominated culture. Many of us drop out of the legal profession altogether, or downsize to more family-friendly careers. The problem is so endemic that the American Bar Association has undertaken an initiative to increase the number of women who pursue successful long-term legal careers. Why are women still lagging so far behind in the legal profession, despite decades of laws and policies designed to support their success? This paper argues that we have reached the limitations of legal strategies based on a formal equality model to advance women’s legal careers. Certainly, providing access, equal treatment, pregnancy leave, and family-friendly policies have led to progress for women—and some men—in the legal profession. However, we now know that access and formal equality are not enough to dismantle the deep structural and cultural barriers to women’s advancement in the legal profession. Access and formal equality will never change the perception that women who take advantage of flexible hours—the Mommy Track—are less dedicated to their work and less worthy of promotion than those who bill sixty hours a week. Access and formal equality will never prevent bullying and sexual harassment by more powerful male supervisors and colleagues, and will never undo the reality that much of the profession’s informal mentoring and rainmaking takes place on golf courses and old boys networking events. The legal reform tools of the feminist movement have accomplished a lot, but they are no match for entrenched power and unconscious bias. For that, we need new tools that move beyond the current structures and realities of power and privilege. This paper argues that the legal profession could benefit from the lessons and strategies of today’s new leaders of the Fourth Wave. Fourth Wave feminists are leading the way in resisting entrenched misogyny in the entertainment and political arenas—developing coalitions, running for office, and using social media to demand change in the upper echelons of power. They are demanding a seat at the table when decisions are made about what constitutes diversity, inclusion, and equal treatment. The Women’s March and the #MeToo movements provide exemplars for the tools Fourth Wave feminists are deploying to bring about lasting cultural change. This paper lays out a framework for what it might look like to bring these Fourth Wave feminist strategies to the legal profession. Based on the Women’s March and other Fourth Wave writings, it identifies four pillars of change to the current diversity and inclusion paradigm: 1. Developing a conscious leadership model that counters deeply entrenched narratives of unconscious bias; 2. Developing strategies to make government and private legal employers more representative of the people they serve; 3. Developing new frameworks for valuing people’s intersecting identities; and 4. Developing decentralized leadership models that provide pipelines to the top levels of the profession.