Professor Peterson and the Lawyers

In 2017 Professor Jordan Peterson sat down with social critic, Camille Paglia*, to talk about what’s wrong with the world, and the Western world, in particular. Within the course of this discussion Peterson recounted a situation where female lawyers were advocating for a less antagonistic and more collaborative internal atmosphere. Law is a notoriously competitive and adversarial profession, both inside and outside of law firms and Professor Peterson didn’t see why law firms, which are still mostly male, should have to alter the way they do things to suit these women.

My first real introduction to Jordan Peterson was watching his amazing series on the mythological underpinnings to our ideas of God. I thought he was marvelous and what he had to say was both insightful and fascinating! I still often find him insightful when he’s talking about the journey of the self, philosophical models, mythological influences, etc., which are his true area of expertise. However, although sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are neighboring fields, they are not one in the the same. Peterson is not a sociologist nor an expert in sociobiology, and this if often where he goes awry. All too often when talking about societal constructs, I find that he espouses a theory that does not take into consideration the full picture or all of the relevant facts of what he is trying to discuss. For someone so clearly intelligent to indulge in this, I find maddening, because to me the hallmark of an intelligent mind is a curious mind. Peterson tries to go at the world from the point of view of the individual, often neglecting to recognize that all of us live within a society and that no man (or woman) is an island. The most glaring example of this I’ve come across is in his description about the situation with the law firms.

Law remains one of the least equitable professions, despite common-place steps that have been taken in recent years to try to ensure gender-neutral policies for hiring and advancement and the simplistic explanation for this lack of women at the top of the legal profession, according to Professor Peterson, is two-fold:

1. that women, in general, have a higher level of Agreeableness, which isn’t conducive to being successful in a highly antagonistic field like law and
2. that much of what it takes to be successful in the legal profession (as in many high level, demanding professions) is the ability and willingness to focus almost single-mindedly on the job, and that by the time women have hit their 30s, they’ve usually turned a lot of their attention towards families and children.

But the problem is, this only touches down lightly on the surface of the story. It also completely fails to contemplate the benefits of a less entrenched outlook and other possibilities. Here are a few of the other things that need to be considered when evaluating why, despite being around 51% of law school graduates, women are not highly represented in the upper echelons of most law firms. Professor Deborah Rhode, a well known expert on legal ethics, has researched and written extensively on what’s wrong with the culture of law firms, relating to women in law, in particular, and has this to say,

“While largely unconscious, enduring cultural, interpersonal, and institutional norms influence this inequality. For example, while certainly not exhaustive, some of these detrimental conventions include: negative perceptions of those utilizing leave and flexible work schedule options for care work; gendered beliefs about the “appearance” of male-female working relationships, potentially limiting women’s opportunities for the adequate sponsorship and networking opportunities so vital to advancement; and unconscious reference to gender in the assignment of tasks. For example, a gender gap in billable hours exists even when women work longer hours than men, suggesting that women are tasked with more non-billable (administrative) duties within their firm, leading to potentially less time devoted to billing and business development, which are key factors for promotion.

Culturally, the “hyper-competitive professional ideology” of the legal profession also tends to value “traditionally male” behaviors to the detriment of women. In the practice of law, women experience a double bind in which they must carefully balance performing aggressively and assertively enough to be considered competent to handle demanding legal scenarios while maintaining an acceptable level of the softness and agreeability required of hegemonic femininity. These largely unconscious cultural narratives about femininity affect many aspects of practicing law — both in firms and in the courtroom. For example, it has been shown that in hiring procedures, although hiring metrics are officially gender-neutral, those in charge of hiring and promotion still tend to do so through a gendered lens which can color people’s perceptions of women’s work. As one can imagine, this double bind requiring balance of “male” and “female” characteristics can be especially problematic for female litigators.” (1)

Peterson’s response to the hyper-competitive professional ideology is essentially that men ought to be able to run their law firms in the way that they wish. As late as the 1960s law firms routinely declined to even interview female candidates for jobs, and although that has obviously since changed, the continued notion that these are still somehow male bastions that are kindly allowing women to play too, as long as they play by the old rules, is both outdated and short-sighted. The hyper-competitive internal professional ideology that comes out of all of those years as a “boys only” club means that law firms are some of the most toxic work environments around, for both men and women. A Psychology Today article on The Depressed Lawyer states

• According to an often cited Johns Hopkins University study of more than 100 occupations, researchers found that lawyers lead the nation with the highest incidence of depression.

• An ABA Young Lawyers Division survey indicated that 41 percent of female attorneys were unhappy with their jobs.

• In 1996, lawyers overtook dentists as the profession with the highest rate of suicide.

• The ABA estimates that 15–20 percent of all U.S. lawyers suffer from alcoholism or substance abuse.

• Seven in ten lawyers responding to a California Lawyers magazine poll said they would change careers if the opportunity arose. (2)

The Journal of the American Bar Association regularly writes about the crisis in substance abuse, depression and suicide within the legal profession, and it’s clearly a concern for the industry as a whole. (3)

So to answer Professor Peterson’s question about why law firms might want to consider changing some of their structures and methodologies, the answer is not only because it’s literally killing them to not do so, it’s because they are also shorting themselves on talent and undermining their bottom line by making it so difficult for women to stay and succeed within the profession.

“The study on gender diversity by Marcus Noland, Tyler Moran, and Barbara Kotschwar for the Peterson Institute for International Economics (different Peterson, but ironies abound!) released earlier this year says there is a positive correlation between the presence of women in corporate leadership and performance “in a magnitude that is not small.”

It is hard to nail down the exact performance bump a woman’s presence can lend a company — only about half of the companies studied had any female leaders at all. But the study did suggest that having a woman in an executive position leads to better performance, with the more women the better.” (4)

According to a 2014 world-wide study by human resources consulting firm, DDI, companies with higher levels of female managers were more likely to have better performance and better bottom lines. “The DDI study is not the first to suggest that women leaders boost companies’ financial performance. In a widely-cited 2012 Harvard Business Review blog post, consultants Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman described their survey of 7,300 business leaders. They asked respondents to rate the effectiveness of male and female managers. Like the DDI study, they looked at women in leadership roles throughout organizations, and not just in executive positions. They examined 16 different “competencies,” like taking initiative and driving for results, and found that women rated higher than men in 12 of the categories. When it came to total leadership strength, “at every level, more women were rated by their peers, their bosses, their direct reports, and their other associates as better overall leaders than their male counterparts — and the higher the level, the wider that gap grows.” (5)

So yes, it’s true that part of the issue in law firms is that women are attempting to succeed in a highly masculinized (Yang) field and this is not always their main area of strength (although sometimes it is). But it’s also in part because they aren’t being encouraged or allowed to fully use all of the tools for success at their disposal, including more feminine (Yin) traits, such as collaboration, which would actually benefit everyone. The research cited above indicates that the legal profession as a whole would be a healthier and more productive place if it were to become a more balanced field (like the taijitu, the Yin/Yang symbol), rather than to remain an ultra-masculine one. Not only would women (as well as men) be more satisfied and less likely to burn out, they would have a better opportunity to shine. This would mean more than just succeeding at the “male game of law” but actually transforming it into a place where new models are embraced and a wider variety of talents are supported, which again, would be of benefit to men, women and to the firm as a whole, in both psychological and financial ways.

Maintaining the status quo, just because you have the power to do so, isn’t really in anyone’s long term best interest, in the legal profession or the world at large.

I can only imagine what impact large numbers of chronically depressed and substance abusing lawyers has on productivity.

But why should some of these changes be encouraged if not mandated? Because it’s not very often that people who have the power to maintain the status quo give it up unless they are pushed to do so, even if it will ultimately benefit them and society as a whole. We have health and safety regulations, child labor laws, 40 hour work weeks (for most people) and basic civil rights for more than just White men because of such mandates. Is it possible to over-regulate and over-mandate societal guidelines? Of course, but the tension of walking that line is infinitely better than the alternative. In the 1890s, the standard work-week for a manufacturing job was a staggering 100 hours per week because that’s what those in power were able to demand. (6) It took 50 years of constant agitation to get that finally codified as being unacceptable in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1940. (7) Should we have waited for that to end voluntarily? Should there still be children in coal mines? I don’t think so!

If you are going to be an evolutionary psychologist, perhaps you ought to consider the potential benefits of continued evolution and not just stay stuck in old lanes. Yes, women tend to have more of certain kinds of traits and men tend to have others. I take no issue with that at all but I fully support that both men and women are individuals who ought to be able to pursue whatever their interests and capabilities allow for them to pursue, without artificial barriers, most of which are sociological, and thereby mutable, in nature.

The second part of Professor Peterson’s explanation about why there are so few women in top levels at law firms (which I’ve gleaned from this clip as well as others) is that they don’t have the single-mindedness required to do so because they are also balancing families and children. And yet somehow, this doesn’t seem to be an impediment for male lawyers of the same age who are also beginning to start families. This is because women still overwhelmingly have primary responsibility for child-rearing and home-keeping duties, and not necessarily by choice. As was so aptly pointed out in this Villanova Law Review article, “Mother-work is not necessarily a fundamental part of women’s identity, nor is it necessarily women’s choice to perform this work. The question of whether women are biologically more suited than men to mothering obscures the central point that child care has been constructed as work that is gendered female, and women are drawn into participating in it. As early second-wave feminists pointed out, and as they are echoed by contemporary sociobiologists, biology is not necessarily destiny; what matters are the constraints under which it becomes destiny.” (8)

These constraints of destiny are precisely what Peterson routinely fails to grapple with under the mistaken notion that individual psychology and the very real benefits of self-responsibility can take place in a vacuum from sociological structures designed to keep those already in power in a continued state of being so. Yes, women do get burned out trying to do a masculine-oriented job by masculine-oriented rules all day, especially when they then have to come home and do an entire second full-time job there, but the take-away from that need not be that women shouldn’t try to pursue that avenue of work, even if they find it meaningful or interesting. It should not be that they must then expect to make greater personal sacrifices than their male peers if they intend to pursue law (or any highly demanding profession). The take-away shouldn’t be that women ought to not advocate for a system that has fewer artificial barriers to success.

The take-away should be that we have an opportunity to shift that paradigm in a variety of ways, so that it not only makes things easier for women but that it makes things better for men also, as well as for the bottom line and health of the firm.

When you stop only looking at the trees and how they’ve always been there that way, then you can begin to perceive the forest as well, and to dance with the possibilities that a larger vista might present. I have worked in law firms and am married to a lawyer. We understand the realities of law firm life, rather than the somewhat romantisized notions of them as one of the last bastions of “undying masculinity”, which ought to be left alone. For someone as clearly intelligent and thoughtful as Jordan Peterson, this really ought not to to be such a hard sell.

*I eventually had to stop watching the Peterson/Paglia conversation because the unrecognized irony of a woman like Paglia who is living what would be considered, by traditional standards, a masculine life, fondly reminiscing of the time when women would take their laundry to the the stream together in rural Italy and would make a picnic out of it, was just too much to bear. If you enjoy being a home-maker and want to sing over your domestic chores, please do, and you should be honored and respected for that, but it also shouldn’t be a woman’s only option and it’s certainly not the only way for a woman to find fulfillment in life. And this is born out by the fact that Paglia is not home singing over the laundry with her girlfriends, but is instead discussing ideas with the likes of Jordan Peterson!

References

1. Deborah L. Rhode (2015) The Trouble with Lawyers, Oxford University Press

2. Tygre Latham, Psy. D (2011) The Depressed Lawyer, Psychology Today available at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/therapy-matters/201105/the-depressed-lawyer

3. Roy Strom (2017) ABA Report Promotes Changes to Treat Addiction, Depression, The American Lawyer available at https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/sites/americanlawyer/2017/08/14/aba-report-promotes-changes-to-treat-addiction-depression/?slreturn=20180228112557

4. Seth Archer (2016) Companies With Women in Leadership Roles Crush the Competition, Business Insider available at http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-with-women-in-leadership-roles-perform-better-2016-6

5. Susan Adams (2014) Companies Do Better With Women Leaders (But Women Need More Confidence To Lead), Study Says, Forbes available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/08/05/companies-do-better-with-women-leaders-but-women-need-more-confidence-to-lead-study-says/#4d2e8ea35ffc

6. Shana Lebowitz (2015) Here’s How the 40 Hour Work Week Became the Standard in America, Business Insider available at http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-40-hour-workweek-2015-10

7. 2456. 29 U.S.C. 201 TO 219 — Fair Labor Standards Act, available at www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-2456-29-usc-201-219-fair-labor-standards-act

8. Naomi R. Can (1999) Gendered Identities: Women and Household Work, Villanova Law Review, Vol. 44: p. 525