Blog #29: Minority Women Lawyers

Four percent of all lawyers are minorities, even less than that are women. The retention rate for keeping minority women at law firms is low. There are many reasons as to why minority women do not stay at their first place of employment. Most minority women experience “exclusion, neglect, and harassment” according to “Why So Few Minority Women Stay at Law Firms”. I can see why minority women would choose to find employment in another establishment. For example, a Korean woman was invited into a meeting with a Korean man so she could see someone who shared the same ethnic background as him. The Korean woman did not play this game though and told the client that he probably speaks better English than she speaks Korean. A lot of the women explained that it can be exhausting to have to endure these biases and stereotypes and that in a lot of the cases it is not even worth the trouble to try and fix the problem. These women prefer to put in the resignation and look for a job somewhere else. There is more to it than using these minority women as buffers with clients or to prove that the law firm is diverse; one woman was asked to sit in a meeting because she was both a minority and a woman and the client did not think that the law firm was diverse. She was a token and used to better than image of the law firm. Most of these women also state that they were subjected to racial jokes and innuendos. One Native American lawyer was asked continually where their tomahawk was and if he/she was going to scalp the employee. When people are subjected to these stereotypes regularly it weighs on them. No one would want to work in an environment like that. Instead of turning the other cheek they decide to turn to another company. Companies lose so much money because they cannot retain their lawyers. Now they have to recruit and re-train more employees who will probably end up leaving for the same reason and the whole ugly cycle continues.