What Legal Organizations Can Do to Get More Senior Women Leaders

Join presenters Andrea S. Kramer ("Andie") and Alton B. Harris ("Al"), who have been working together for more than 30 years to promote gender equality in the workplace, for this important program about overcoming gender bias in the legal profession. They discuss the career achievement disparity between female and male lawyers, and make clear that none of the common explanations – women's lesser ambition, different life preferences, and greater domestic responsibilities – account for this disparity. They persuasively argue that gender stereotypes and the biases that flow from them are the true cause of women's and men's unequal career success in the legal profession. They then present specific techniques and practices women, men, and legal organizations can use to avoid or overcome the often subtle and unconscious discriminatory consequences of gender biases, against the background of the implications of the ABA's Model Rule 8.4(g).

About the Faculty

Married to each other, Andie and Al are highly successful lawyers who have mentored thousands of women over the course of their careers. Andie is a partner in an international law firm, a founding member of her firm's Diversity Committee and chair emerita of its Gender Diversity Subcommittee. She currently serves on the advisory board to the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, Diversity and Inclusion. Al was a founding partner of a successful Chicago law firm, where he served for many years as managing partner and then as a member of its Executive and Compensation Committees. Over the course of his career, Al grew increasingly concerned about the barriers and biases women faced in traditionally male career environments. Because of this concern, Al has mentored and advised women in many career fields, focusing on the communication skills they need to advance despite the prevalence of negative gender stereotypes.

Andie and Al are coauthors of Breaking Through Bias: Communication Techniques for Women to Succeed at Work, which was named one of the best business books of 2016 by Women@Work and called by Publishers Weekly "a well-organized, well-thought-out call to action." Publishers Weekly called their second book, It's Not You, It's the Workplace: Women's Conflict at Work and the Bias that Built It, (Nicholas Brealey, 2019), "a refreshing, well-timed rebuttal to a hackneyed old fiction that blames individual women for the institutional biases they face." Porchlight Books (formerly 800-CEO-Read) named it one of the 2019 "Books to Watch."

You can learn more at www.AndieandAl.com and follow them both on Twitter at @AndieandAl.

Learning Objectives:

1. Explore the pervasive nature of gender stereotypes with respect to women, men, families, work, and leadership
2. Recognize how these gender stereotypes result in discriminatory biases that operate to hold women back in their legal careers
3. Identify practical strategies and effective techniques to avoid or overcome gender bias and achieve gender equality in the legal profession