Life at Stoel: Women in Leadership

Transcript

Maren Norton
Partner, Litigation

The challenges of being a woman in law and also women generally in law are something that I've grappled with my whole career and I'm not sure will be solved during the rest of my career. But I think the fundamental challenge is that women need to see themselves down the road. They need to see a path. They need to see something different than maybe traditionally you see in law firms. I mean, I think today, and I'll probably have the stats wrong, but I think it's something like 22% of equity partners are women; that's not very many. There's a small fraction of CEOs that are women. Women leaders are a unique breed in many ways, and so one of the ways we can best sort of bring along and educate and promote women is by being women in leadership roles ourselves. I take very seriously what I think my mom taught me as a very little kid, which is practice what you preach. And if I want to bring up and make others believe that they too can be leaders, I need to step up and be a leader in my own right, and so there's many challenges, and I'll forever have a challenge.

I was just in a room the other day where once again I'm in a giant deposition prep session and there's the witnesses, there's the lawyers, there's the client and I'm the only woman in the room. And that happens over and over and over. It would be very easy to think, we haven't come anywhere in 20 plus years. What am I doing? Why do I keep trying? Or, I can look around a room and see this is an opportunity for me to take this experience, to learn from it, to grow from it, and to show all these men in the room that they're fabulous and wonderful too, but that there's a little bit different perspective that I can bring to the table. And so it's about perspective every day and it's about initiative, it's about drive and it's about digging deep when it's hardest to dig deep to say there is room to make improvement. I believe we can and we will.