Apparently, 40% of practicing lawyers are women. This statistic always surprises me given my daily experience moving through courtrooms and offices and Zoom calls where the faces and voices talking at and over me >60% male. Where’s the “almost half” contingent? I ask myself after opposing counsel thanks me for being “so sweet.”

In therapy I talk about how I have no role models. In law school we’re given the box-checking DEI spiel about how women don’t become partners at law firms because they leave the profession in their 30’s to raise children. It’s an individual choice, not a structural issue, you see.

I stand there in my freshly-pressed suit, hair sprayed and fake pearls laid just so, while I wait for a sweaty, disheveled potato of a man to confirm with his client whether a disabled single mother of two will be removed from her home in the next 48 hours. The decision is ultimately made because he feels like it.

Is it better or worse for the people I serve to be coy and cordial? Can well-timed eyelashes lure a bad actor into a false sense of security that ultimately brings about the justice I seek? Is there honor in my supplication? Or is it better to play the bitch? The no-nonsense version of myself lurking within? I’ve seen the spikes incite fear — but as with many men, that fear only draws out a rash, unproductive defensiveness through which no one is served.

Perhaps the reason that women leave the profession is self-preservation. In this work we are so often confronted by the fact that we are, as individuals, helpless to stop the grind of evictions, of incarcerations, of interpersonal violence. We create, at best, small disruptions in these systems. This logic applies to the spheres in which we move, it seems; our presence nothing but a different box checked on the demographic survey when its time to renew your bar card. How does that make a life?