Normally I don’t refer to events stemming from my own experience in commenting on our industry-indeed, this is something of a first in the 8-year history of Adam Smith, Esq.-but what I want to talk about today is not self-referential and not even, really, about my own experience.
My alma mater, Princeton, released a report in March called “Undergraduate Women’s Leadership,” which basically detailed the paucity thereof, in damning if too-familiar terms.
You may not be surprised to learn that I read it with great interest, for a few reasons including (a) I attended Princeton well past the time when coeducation was new and perceived as somewhat experimental; indeed, as memory serves, my class was about 50/50 male/female; in other words, women at Princeton were something I took utterly for granted–I could not have imagined it otherwise, and never had the least interest in attending a same-sex school; (b) to hear that the status of women at Princeton called for a study lo these many decades later was alarming in itself, although on reflection I perhaps should not have been surprised; and (c) given that an institution like Princeton with the resources, sensitivity, and intrinsic will to do the right thing had undertaken this study I thought the results would be intriguing no matter what.
Then, of course, there was the chance I might learn something applicable to Law Land.
I firmly believe I did. Read on to see if you agree.
Here are some of the highlights:
What Have We Learned?
One important general finding soon emerged from our committee’s research and deliberations: There are differences–subtle but real–between the ways most Princeton female undergraduates and most male undergraduates approach their college years, and in the ways they navigate Princeton when they arrive. This is hardly a startling finding, but it is important to note it. In terms of the president’s charge, men and women are indeed experiencing Princeton differently, on average.
A second general finding should be emphasized as well. This is not a Princeton-specific phenomenon. Through the work of our subcommittee on comparative data, we learned that many of the patterns we observed at Princeton are common on other campuses.
In case you’re wondering, ask yourself how this applies to law firms (the numbering is from the original report-there were ten points).
2) Although some women do run for elected office, many students choose less visible jobs behind the scenes. However, some women have expressed interest in more prominent posts and were actively discouraged by other students.
3) Despite being less likely than men to stand as candidates for a presidency or other more visible posts, undergraduate women do a large proportion of the important work in the organizations to which they belong.
4) Women consistently undersell themselves, and sometimes make self-deprecating remarks in situations where men might stress their own accomplishments.
5) In many situations, men tend to speak up more quickly than women, to raise their hands and express their thoughts even before they are fully formulated, whereas women may take a bit more time to shape their comments and be more reticent about speaking up.
7) Women, more than men, are pressured to behave in certain socially acceptable ways.
The committee then has “general” and “specific” recommendations. The first general one give you a flavor-not unsurprising-of the tonality of the rest:
We have identified several ways in which women (and men) can be encouraged to be leaders in a variety of contexts, and excel academically on this campus. These points can be taken as general recommendations and as goals that specific recommendations are designed to help us pursue.
First, Princeton needs to recognize and celebrate the many ways in which both women and men undergraduates are providing leadership, the enormous amount of effective work and organizing talent they bring to organizations of all kinds.
You get the idea. Fair warning: To stay with me, you’re going to have to gloss over the committee-consensus-speak and try to hew to the substance.
There are also some “specific” recommendations, of which I will include only the ones on mentoring and leadership, which have some relevance to law land. On mentoring:
The most consistent theme in our conversations with alumni/ae was the importance of mentoring, understood as good advice, close connections with peers and others who understand life at Princeton, and relationships with people at different stages of life whom one knows and can trust.
Mentoring for academic achievement, offered by faculty, staff, and graduate students. This involves developing and maintaining one’s confidence; balancing breadth and depth in academics; and leveraging resources at Princeton in areas of strength and areas of weakness.
Mentoring for success in social and extracurricular life, which is offered peer-to-peer by one student for another, and involves feeling more comfortable at Princeton and taking on responsibility in campus organizations.
Mentoring for leadership on campus, which can be provided by faculty, staff, alumni/ae, or other students. This involves finding a voice, feeling comfortable with exercising authority, understanding how to set or influence an agenda, and learning how to run a meeting, pick one’s battles, handle discouraging or offensive remarks, network, strategize, and build coalitions.
And here we are on leadership:
Leadership training already happens at Princeton in several student organizations and University-sponsored activities. Princeton students, faculty, and staff are notably entrepreneurial, and much good work is being done. We believe that these programs should be more widely known, with best practices shared across the University and more opportunities for leadership training for interested students. We can also benefit from looking at models on other campuses.
OK, where does this leave us?
If we can try to abstract from the academic tone, which seems determined to remove every trace of humanity, passion, and voice from the report, leaving a denatured and deracinated pale imitation of what could be itself, we can discern some truths in the fog.
More interesting by far is the reaction published six weeks later in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) of May 11, where the following dialogue appeared:
PAW asked two Princetonians from different eras for their reactions to the study: Christine Stansell ’71, a scholar of women’s history at the University of Chicago who spent many years on the Princeton faculty; and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux ’11, who this year shared the Moses Taylor Pyne Honor Prize – Princeton’s highest undergraduate academic honor.
Stansell sets the stage with a nuanced view:
This is a model report: lucid, thoughtful, well documented, easily digested. It’s exceptional at doing what reports are supposed to do: It explains a problem, documents an approach, and provides solutions that can be implemented easily. It maintains a balanced tone; neither lays blame nor obfuscates; nods respectfully toward counterarguments.
Still, there are bound to be skeptics. From one angle, announcing a problem about women and leadership could not come at a more surprising moment. The country has a formidable first lady from Princeton, and two Supreme Court justices are alumnae. We have the first female president among the Big Three Ivy universities and a college administration packed with accomplished, powerful women. It’s a vivid tableau of women as leaders.
But to scores of others — faculty, alums, current undergraduates — the report will come as old news. Women have a problem at Princeton, and it never goes away. It’s diffuse, elusive, and tenacious. True, it waxes and wanes, and the definition and intensity change over time. In the early years, it was the sheer absence of women students that seemed to be the issue; in the 1980s, it was the ubiquity of sexual harassment, ranging from actionable aggression to loutish male behavior.
[…] Whatever the sources of the problem, it’s not overt sexual discrimination, at least on the academic end of things. Female students have female professors, and deal with female deans, and walk into classrooms where, more than likely, they will not be alone. They are not likely to be told that a woman doesn’t belong in any field that is taught at Princeton. There are no campus institutions barred to women, including the eating clubs. Half of each entering class is female.
Now she begins to get into the unspeakable $64 question, family and motherhood:
The world is not closed to talented women, but it is stingy with them, and it gets stingier the higher you go. The campus that envelops these young men and women has yet to become a place that demonstrates how different things can be. Regardless of well-meaning efforts and professed commitments, women still are a minority on the faculty. There is one child-care center, and it dates to 1969. Motherhood is a minefield in negotiating tenure. By my rough, quick count, a third of the department heads are female, and only a dismaying 15 percent of endowed chairs.
Stansell goes on to talk about motherhood more specifically:
Necessary Dreams, psychiatrist Anna Fels’ brilliant book about young women and ambition, begins with the psychologists’ insight that the acquisition of mastery — including the desire to lead — requires an audience as well as a goal. A child does not learn to walk by herself; she does it in response to encouragement, smiles, and approbation. The cheering chorus follows girls through high school, urging them on in the big game, the science competition, the class election, and the term paper on Moby Dick. But then the volume of cheering drops, and anxious voices, internal and external, begin to pipe up. Will you have a life? A family? What about children? Can you really work? Or, can you really stay home to raise a family? Will you ever fall in love, anyway? Don’t you want too much?
At the moment, unanswered questions.
The other perspective comes from Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux ’11, a third-generation Princetonian who found herself alienated and struggling at the start. Here’s how she put it:
Like many freshmen, I felt adrift during my first year of college. The shock of adjusting to an intense academic environment, combined with a culture of heavy drinking that seemed, for the most part, to structure the norm of casual sexual encounters, made me feel — as a woman in the Class of 2012 wrote on the SCUWL website — “lost, overwhelmed, objectified, and intimidated.”
She responded with what I consider to be grit (emphasis mine):
I founded organizations and sought out leadership roles, organizing events and conversations around issues of gender and sexuality. Suddenly, I was no longer anonymous: I had a respected if sometimes-controversial identity as a campus feminist activist. This was a mixed blessing; my activism could be a lonely enterprise, especially on a campus where the most moderate, conciliatory attempts to de-stigmatize “feminism” left me branded as a radical. But the real difficulty was that even as my self-confidence grew, I could not stop comparing myself to everyone else around me, and finding myself wanting. Emerging as a leader raised the stakes. With every success, I kept measuring myself by how much more I needed to do. I existed in a haze of e-mails and event-planning and academic anxiety, unwilling to forgive myself for being, well, imperfect. My work on the steering committee showed me, with stark clarity, that these feelings were not unique. This “intensity of self-effacement,” in the words of one alumna, seems to erode women’s confidence and dampen our willingness to take risks.
A similar exploration of college women’s leadership, conducted at Duke in 2003, used the phrase “effortless perfection” to describe a phenomenon that seemed to be equally ubiquitous at Princeton. Not only were women expected to be, as one undergraduate reported on the steering committee’s website, “pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly,” we needed to make it look like we weren’t trying — that our impressive academic, extracurricular, and social achievements came naturally to us. Visibility as a leader worked in opposition to this model of success.
Amelia is clearly a student of the 21st Century who realizes that “having it all” is so yesterday, yet also, aspirationally, so tomorrow:
These, of course, are issues [of leadership, recognition, and questions of self-worth] that extend beyond the orange [Princeton] bubble. In many ways, the women of my generation are haunted by our mothers’ successes and limitations. I know few women who have not thought about whether they would pause their career to raise a child, follow their partner to a foreign city, or postpone childbearing until the demands of the career ladder eased. I know even fewer women who have good answers to these questions. I am caught between the image of my parents telling me that I could be anything, and the realities of my young adulthood, in which I have struggled for four years to be the “right” kind of woman: articulate but not overbearing, feminine but not girly, accommodating but not spineless, and above all, nice, not angry, and not strident. I still wrestle with the silent postscript: If I can be anything, then I must be everything.
In the end, I had to reconsider what “success” meant. I wanted to be a guide as well as a visionary, exploring unknown territory without a linear goal. It took me four years to accept that this kind of leadership did, in fact, constitute “success.” My struggles have stemmed from trying to measure myself by an unattainable standard, one that happens to be different for men and women. The challenge is for Princeton to be the kind of place where neither gender nor an impossible ideal structures its students’ lives; where being breathtakingly busy is not the only marker of success; and where emotional health is not an indulgence, but a necessity.
In finding my voice at Princeton, I discovered a kind of leadership where sincerity, efficacy, and visibility were not incompatible.
How much do the clear and poignant struggles of these women act as a mirror of reality in our firms? I wouldn’t have written this piece if I didn’t think they’re worthy of reflection, introspection, and–action.
Consider.
Reflect.
Act.
Repeat.
