The Next 30 Years - Episode 4/4 in our series marking the 30th anniversary of the release of the CBA Task Force on Gender Equality’s groundbreaking Report “Touchstones for Change: Equality, Diversity, and Accountability”.
A discussion about what is actually behind the words, equity, diversity and inclusion.
Our final episode with original CBA Task Force on Gender Equality members, Justice Sophie Bourque, Patricia Blocksom, Daphne Dumont and principal author Melina Buckley and a diverse cross-section of women lawyers working in the profession today on how much progress has been made on gender equality since 1993.
And the next thirty years?
“When will the profession get to a place where we can look back and say, we got there!?” -Sameera Sereda
Link to the full report: touchstonesForChange.pdf (cba.org)
Touchstones 30th Anniversary - Ep.4 The Next 30 Years
[Start of recorded material 00:00:00]
Male Speaker: This is The Every Lawyer presented by the Canadian Bar Association.
Prabhpreet Sangha: I really hope that together – that in another 20, 30 years from now – I hope you guys do another Podcast session [laughs] and we’re able to say that things are different.
Julia Tetrault-Provencher: Hi. I’m Julia Tetrault-Provencher. Welcome to The Next 30 Years, Episode 4 of our Mini-Series marking the 30th Anniversary of the CBA Touchstones report, affecting actual change on EDI in the legal profession since 1993.
Sameera Sereda: Yes. It’s amazing that this work was done in 1993. And I’d almost forgotten about it until it was sent to me again by email and I reviewed it again. It was really ahead of its time in 1993. That was 30 years ago. And it’s heartening to remember that such work was being done 30 years ago. What’s disheartening is that we’re still talking about [laughs] the same issues.
Gurpreet K. Gill: Yes. I think I want to see more women led Firms. I want that to be the majority. Because there’s – often times I feel like women are leading Firms when they’re fed up being at the Firms that they are because of all these issues when it comes to discrimination, equality, what have you. And it’s that frustration that makes us leave and start up on our own. So it would be nice if we can come together and create the environment that we wish we had for others. That’s what I take on. And I’ve gone through all sorts of experiences and I want to be able to set up something eventually down the road being, “This is the awful stuff that I’ve gone through and my friends have gone through and I refuse for anybody to experience that in this environment.” And have those type of practices, policies, everything in place, to ensure that doesn’t come to it.
Prabhpreet: I would hope that in about another 20 to 30 years that Firms don’t look the way they do right now – that there is more diversity in the Firms. You’re seeing cultural diversity. You’re seeing gender diversity. It’s not just the way you see them now. And I would hope that they’re very different. And I would hope that there is more respect for – if you’re a junior lawyer; if you’re an associate; if you’re self-employed. I would hope that even the senior lawyers change their perspectives of the younger lawyers – guide them rather than judging them – because I’ve had friends that have left. They’ve been yelled at by their senior lawyers or faced some sort of abusive environments. And I would also hope that the articling or the NCA process, or of transferring – because I went through that as well, I studied in the U.S. – that there is more connection or guidance; like how we talked about there’s a place to turn to and not be afraid; that if you need to report something, or you’re dealing with something the resources are clearly available.
Manroop Ghuman: You have a Diversity and Equity Committee. Do something with it. Don’t just let it sit there. Actually take action and think about the people in it and actually try and make a change and don’t just leverage it as a way to get people of different culture backgrounds, to come to your Firm.
Christina Cook: The two programs, ED&I and Reconciliation, are usually exclusive programs that have different goals and are both needed. Because Reconciliation is meant as an undertaking for all Canadians to address and move past a genocide – historical as well as ongoing lasting effects of genocide – in order for Canada to live up to the promise of being a safe and welcoming country for all its people. It needs to address and reconcile with the first people, with the people who were dispossessed of their lands, were dispossessed of their children, were over criminalized. And so I think that issue is really important, as we move forward.
ED&I, I think is a separate issue where it’s really important that in those programs different views and perspectives are included and discussions are valued. Because study after study will tell you the more inclusive an organization is and the more perspectives that are considered, the better the organization operates, the better product that they produce.
Victoria Fred: There’s still a – and I think this is not culturally specific – I think that there’s a generational thing as well. I think when I think about the leadership in various boardrooms that I’m involved in, I usually have to assess, “Okay. Who am I dealing with? Is it my generation? Or is it the previous generation that’s still in leadership?”
Vasu Sivapalan: Why do we not try to help folks? We see a lot of international lawyers coming here and they say that. It’s not that they don’t want to reach this target that’s set for them at their Firms but they have so many other responsibilities. They may be supporting people back home. They may have to have a second job. They may have to have all of these other duties – taking a Citizenship test; re-educating themselves to even do the things that they can do here; learning a new language – all of these things.
And for women too, it’s all these other responsibilities you have at home. Nobody thinks about the mental capacity that it takes to even schedule life. The amount of work to just take your kids to these events, to these activities, to what’s for dinner, all of that stuff. And we forget to think that we are humans outside of that Firm life. And I’ve worked with so many lawyers who had a stay-at-home wife and they were White male lawyers who could just go to work, work for as many hours as they need to and go home and everything was taken care of.
It’s so different now. So this idea of equality, for me it really means nothing if there’s no equity behind that. And I feel that’s where we really need to put our focus on. I know even people putting EDI Policy, it’s like we’re trying to be equitable. But are you? Are you really helping those that really need that help, so that they at least start at the same point as everybody else?
Sameera: This is such an important question. How do we get rid of the actual barriers? We are asked this question every day when we’re doing recruitment. It used to be that clients used to say to me – confidentially of course – “Okay Sameera. And when you’re doing recruitment, we don’t actually want a woman, because she’s going to go on mat leave. She’s just going to get pregnant and go on mat leave. It was this very quiet kind of hush-hush, “We don’t actually want a woman in her childbearing years, because she’s going to go on mat leave and we’re going to have to deal with that.”
So that was 15, 20 years ago. Now we’re being asked to ensure we do have a diverse pool. We’re being specifically asked to ensure that the pool that we present to our clients is diverse – not just gender diversity – but racialized diversity. But my question is always, why? Is it just for optics? What work is your company actually doing, to ensure that those diverse voices are going to succeed? So if you do hire a woman for the top job, or a racialized woman, or racialized person, I want to make sure that those diverse voices are going to succeed in that workplace.
But to your point about barriers, what’s interesting about doing recruitment and ensuring a diverse pool – and this actually happened with respect to the Board and the non-profit organization that I started called Women in Law Leadership – the realization as we were awarding women with some of these amazing and celebrating their achievements in Law and awarding the Lifetime Achievement Award, we realized that at the five year mark, that most of the winners were non-racialized women.
And so similarly, we would do the work in terms of trying to ensure that we would have a diverse pool, but at the end of the day, if the only people that apply or are being put forward are not women, or are not racialized women, then you have to ask yourself the question, do they just not exist? Which is ridiculous, [laughs] of course they exist. Is there a barrier to applying? Is there a barrier to being put forward? And how do we address that barrier? How do we break that barrier down, so that we can ensure that women and racialized women, have the confidence or the access to actually come to the table and be a part of that pool?
And so that’s the work that I do in my day job, is to ensure that we have a diverse pool. And to be able to say to my clients, “We have actually reached out into all of these different spaces and areas and broken these barriers down. And identified women and racialized women to come to the table, who may not have even known about the role or have not had the confidence to put their names forward for whatever reason. And we’ve identified those women and we’re bringing them to the table.”
So it’s not enough to say, “Yes. We did a good search. And really here’s your pool of only men.” Because then what we’re saying is, “The women don’t exist,” and that’s not true.
Linda Robertson: But the fact that we now have more women partners, more women in General Counsel, more women Judges, in all these areas – more women Benchers – as role models. And role models play a huge role in any group trying to achieve equity. And that’s why it’s important that we also promote Indigenous lawyers and lawyers from different cultural backgrounds. Those numbers are still much lower than they should be, but those role models and mentoring, that is one of the reasons that more women are moving into those positions. And that’s a huge improvement.
Kamljit Lehal: Yes. When you see people that are doing that that look like you, you’re more inclined to say –
Linda: Yes.
Kamaljit: – “Hey. Yes, I can – You’re more likely to do it yourself.
Linda: Exactly.
Kamaljit: Yes. That’s absolutely true.
Angela Ogang: I want to see women own the fact that they’re good.
Julia: Oh yes.
Angela: Because right now I think that a lot of us have reservations when it comes to – negotiating salaries or promotions; when it comes to asking for what you want; when it comes to even the kind of work that you do when you’re in the Law Firm. You’ve probably heard it that women tend to do the pink files – to get the pink files.
Julia: No. What is that?
Angela: The pink files are the files that don’t really pay and aren’t usually taken into account when the Firm is determining whether they should make you a partner or not. So for example – organizing events, check the Committees and things like that. And so when it comes to those activities, any kind of admin that fall within the Firm, they’ll give that to a woman. But when it comes to things that will lead to maybe acquisition of clients or you getting a file, they tend to give that to men. Whether they do it on purpose or unconsciously, that’s another debate. But that’s what tends to happen.
And so by the time the women and the men come up for partnership, the men would have more to show than the women because she didn’t bring as much money to the Firm and whatever it is that she did isn’t really recognized as something that adds value. I attended an event this week which was really interesting and women were talking about that. I think it was in Ottawa. I happened to be in Ottawa and I dropped into a program by The Young Lawyers Division in Law. And they were all giving their take on what women should do. And I think the consensus was, you don’t have to refuse to take the pink files. [Laughter] You have to be strategic about it. Is it going to get you to where you want to go?
Julia: Yes.
Angela: Don’t just take them because they give it to you or just for the sake of not wanting to disappoint people, because in the end you’ll pay for it. So just be very strategic about every single decision that you make at the Firm. And if you do see that you’re not going anywhere, or that you’re in a Firm where people are not valuing your input, don’t stay. [Laughs] There’s something else.
So I do want to see us be a little tougher. Research has shown that women tend to not negotiate salaries when they’re being hired, as opposed to men. And they only apply for jobs when they feel that they need 100 percent of the qualifications. Whereas men, they’ll apply even if they meet 60, or 50.
Julia: Sixty make it, 80. I mean honestly [laughs] I’ve always been impressed of that. If you call your studies experience, it’s like two years’ experience and then I would apply. I would apply. I’m like, “What?” [Laughs] I would have never done that. But I think it’s good. But I agree with you, yes. Women –
Angela: I think somehow we need to. It’s not about being men. It’s not about –
Julia: No, no.
Angela: – men at all. That’s not the –
Julia: No.
Angela: It’s about realizing our worth.
Julia: Yes. Exactly.
Angela: We could start working on that, so that we have the courage to ask for what we deserve and to leave when we feel that we’re not going to get it or we’re not close to getting it. So in 30 years, I want to see us more confident. I don’t think that we’ll ever get rid of imposter syndrome. [Laughter]
Julia: But you know what, I think it’s good too. And I think it’s important what you said. We’re not aiming at being men. To the opposite actually. We just want to be this version that is more confident and that. And the imposter syndrome can be good sometimes because that’s why we work so hard and that’s why I think we’re so good at what we do also. And but I mean, it’s also bad. I mean you understand what I’m –
Angela: Yes. Yes. I get it.
Julia: [Laughs] Yes. And why we’ll never get rid of it. [Laughs]
Angela: Yes. So I think that once we start seeing other women doing it publicly –
Julia: Yes.
Angela: – then that will inspire us to do the same thing.
Julia: I agree.
Angela: Because right now we just feel like we’re a minority. We’re the only ones asking for a salary increase. And [laughs] once they start getting used to women – all women groups. [Laughter]
Julia: Yes. [Laughs]
Amanda McBride: So I’ve had conversations with friends who also grew up on Reserve and who are now in Toronto. And the consensus seems to be that obviously we want to help out our communities and we do work with our communities. We like to give back, even if it’s just doing pro bono work, a lot of us. But what happens I think, when you move to the larger city, is that it’s not your community that’s putting the pressure on you. It’s the Bar. And I’m not talking about the Indigenous Bar. I’m talking specifically about the Bar in general.
So I’ll give you an example. I went to a Law Society event a couple of weeks ago and the conversation there was about a successful Indigenous lawyer. She’s succeeding and not that salary means anything, but she’s probably going to make a very good salary this year because she won a great number of successful cases. Excellent lawyer. Great civil litigator. The conversation surrounded the fact – and this is the conversation that I overheard – and again the conversation was, “Well isn’t that a shame. She should be giving back to her community.” And what I get from that is first of all, as a woman, she succeeded above and beyond what was – we talk about the Touchstones report and she grew up during that time – and so she succeeded where she was not provided the same opportunities as her colleagues.
And now she’s successful and there’s stigma to her success. And that is now a new hurdle that specifically Indigenous lawyers have to overcome because it's always asked, “Why are you not giving back to your community?” And to be fair, we could be giving back but we don’t do it publicly – and this person in particular does not – but the fact that it’s even a subject of conversation means that there’s still a long way to go. Because you wouldn’t hear that for example, if it was let’s just say a White presenting male lawyer in Toronto. If he succeeded at a litigation case, you’d never hear, “Oh. It’s such a shame that he is not contributing back to the Toronto public, in general.” And so from that perspective, I think we still have a long way to go.
Andrea Menard: And it’s – there’s too much pressure on us. And then if we advocate properly, we’re not in their good books. So we’re a pain. They don’t want to listen to us. So they ignore us. They turn their heads. They’re passive aggressive towards us. Or they – there’s some unconscious bias going on. So they’re not really – sometimes they’re not really being aware that they’re doing that to us, but it’s happening. So that’s why unconscious bias training is really important and it has to be ongoing. It can’t just be a one and done deal.
The world is getting more complex and the leaders do not have the requisite tools to fix things anymore. It takes a diverse population. We have the answers and we have the different skills and tools needed to fix things. And that doesn’t mean hiring a woman, or an Indigenous woman like myself, at the end game. So when things get really fraught, when there’s emergency things happening, it’s called the glass cliff. So they hire me right at the last moment, on the glass cliff. “Oh. And why didn’t Andrea last very long?” “Well [laughs] you hired her right at the end.” Or, “Help us. Help us. Help us. Help us. We’re falling and failing.” And then so what we usually have happen to us is that we usually get blamed. “Oh okay.” Andrea, now she’s the one getting blamed and off she goes and then their career is ruined and then other credibility is ruined. “What happened to Andrea?” She was a flash in the pan and away she goes.
So this has to stop. You can’t be hiring us at the last minute for emergency sakes and have us teetering on the glass cliff, where you can easily push us off.
Manroop Ghuman: Yes. If they hired to a certain extent based on that, but once you got to the Firm, it wasn’t even a level playing field because I think from a diverse background – this is a little bit going off topic – but I come from a non-White-Collar family. None of my family members are professionals and none of them went to Grad School. And so I was the only one. So I didn’t even know what big Law was, until I got into Law School. So it was not on my radar.
Whereas we had my peers who have known about this their entire lives and they have those networks and they have family members who are in Law and in the legal profession and so they were already one step ahead of us. But instead of helping those of us who weren’t on that field, they weren’t promoting us. It was like we were being held back. And it’s yes, you’re here but either you need to figure it out on your own, or just kind of threw you out there and didn’t really care to help you network. But the people with the network, they were – whether it was for business or otherwise – they were helping them even more. So it was they moved forward and you just regressed because there’s no medium ground. And I found that really difficult. And I don’t know if it was necessarily a man versus woman and it was that. I think in general it was one, being of colour – that was a huge difference for me – and being a woman of colour made it that much more difficult.
Sameera: One of the things I wanted to explore – and I’m not sure if others have talked about it – and it really goes to, when will we achieve gender equality? Or when will the profession get to a place where we can look back and say, “We got there.” And I think there’s certain realities that women face, that men don’t face. They’re biological realities. Women who choose to have biological children, have a reality that we face. And all women – and I can now share this because I’m going through it myself and I wouldn’t have been able to share it 10 years ago because I didn’t understand it – is that women also face menopause later in their careers. And at a time in their careers where at 50, you finally reached the top of your game. You’ve finally gotten to and have developed all of this credibility and knowledge and experience and have reached the top of your game, where now we should be able to lead and move forward. And then menopause hits. [Laughs] And it’s another biological reality that if you again, asked me these questions 10 or 15 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate them because I wouldn’t have understood it, but I’m going through it now.
And so the women who choose to have biological children have a biological reality, when they choose to do that. And then all women I think – most anyway – face menopause when they hit a certain age. So we have these biological realities, which unless these biological realities are addressed by the profession – but by society generally – until and unless these realities are addressed and then discussed and then incorporated into these plans of inclusion, we aren’t going to be able to move forward. That’s one of the things that I’ve really realized most recently, as I’m going through menopause myself.
And the second thing that I want to leave you with – because I see this very open-ended question about where we want to see the profession in 30 years? Where do I want to see society in 30 years? Really that’s the bigger question. And I remember when I started Women in Law Leadership and I was reaching out to women for support. And I remember one woman saying to me, “I don’t want to win an award – a women’s award. I want to win an award. Not a women’s only award.” And so I don’t believe in this. I don’t believe in this cause, because I don’t believe in separating out these, what she called, special interest groups.
And I think that that really gave me pause at the time and continues to, because when you look at the legal profession and beyond, there are many equity deserving groups that have been created in order to address issues of inequality, including women’s groups like ours, Women in Law Leadership. And so maybe it would be nice one day, to not have to have those.
Angela: Yes. And then maybe – I’m talking as a Black person – but I’d like to open it up to other people as well that feel that they’re underrepresented, so that they could also have – they could also see themselves in the Justice system at every level. Regardless of where you’re from, you should be able to see people out there because there are brilliant people practicing. But that being said, I have to applaud all the recent efforts that have been made to appoint diverse Judges, to appoint people in positions of power in this country. Whether it’s the recently elected Speaker of the House of Commons, or the Attorney General, Arif Virani. I believe there’s a Judge who was recently named to the Court of King’s Bench in Alberta and she’s of Nigerian ancestry. So those are things that are good to see. We see that we’re moving in the right direction. Because we are in a multicultural country, we should be able to see that in action too.
Julia: Yes. No. I agree. Me too. I’m happy to see that. But I think in 30 years I would like not to be happy to see that and be just like normal. It’s happening. This is it.
Angela: Right.
Julia: Yes. It’s –
Angela: Right. Yes. You don’t [unintelligible 00:28:48]. Yes. It’s just you go to school and you see all these different people. You don’t think about it because it’s just the way that it is. Yes. And in terms of women specifically, I want to see women being able to fully participate in the legal workspace without feeling like somehow they need to change who they are. Or they need to sacrifice things that they want to achieve, whether it’s motherhood or raising a family and things like that. And I shouldn’t just say motherhood. Parenthood in general.
So I want to see that, because right now I’ve heard stories that are really atrocious. For example of women who take mat leave and when they come back, their files have been given out to other people. They have to almost start from scratch. And it took them years to build their practice. They have to rebuild it again. They miss out on partnership opportunities and things like that. So I think that something needs to be done at that level, because a woman should not have to choose between her career and being a parent or raising a family. It can all be done and we have many fine examples of women that have achieved that, but it does take a supportive work environment to make that happen. And the ones that did achieve it, some of them had to really struggle through, but others had the support of their Firm. And so that would be nice to see.
Julia: I mean, I’ve been with you for an hour and I feel so empowered.
That was very empowering Angela Ogang. And before that we heard from Sameera, Manroop, Andrea, Amanda, Vasu, Christina, Prab, and Gurpreet, who will all be familiar to listeners of Episode 3, on Intersectionality.
We have also added Victoria Fred and Linda K Robertson to our forest of diverse women lawyers for this Episode and this Series. We are very keen to keep the conversation going and we’ll be releasing some of the complete interviews and doing new ones in the new year.
We come now to the final segment of our fireside chats with the Touchstones report Author, Melina Buckley and original Taskforce Members, Sophie Bourque, Daphne Dumont, and Patricia Blocksom.
And I’d like to know what do you see in 30 years now? So it’s been 30 years. In 30 years what would you like the legal profession to be? Maybe you can dream or you can be more realistic, how do you see it? I’d like to hear your thoughts on that, because I don’t think we’ll have another Taskforce but I think can still go on with this report and still try to deal with that so, yes. That would be my last question [that I need from you? 00:31:54] is that question. Go ahead. [Laughs]
Patricia: Well I can jump in – let me jump in with my hope for the next 30 years. My hope for the next 30 years is that our profession remains committed to being inclusive, to recognizing that Canadian society is diverse and that we owe it to Canadian society, to reflect that diversity within our profession, at every level of our profession. And I think that that comes with challenges because today we live in a society where we have factions. We have factions that would use terms – I hear people saying this and I want to pull my hair out – “This is too woke for me,” when they talk about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. They talk about wokeness. They talk about, “Why are we doing this?” And so I think there are some challenges that face us.
Julia: Yes.
Patricia: And I think that we need to be committed to having this process and these dialogues continue. And to say that this will not happen unless people keep it on the radar. And say that it has to be an important topic for the Canadian Bar Association and for our profession at every level or we could backslide on this. And we don’t need to look very far to think about what backsliding looks like. All we need to do is look south of our border and say, “That can’t be Canadian society. We can’t go there.” Or even look internationally and think about what’s happening internationally.
So I think it still remains a challenge. We’ve made progress. We have a forest, but we need to protect that forest. And we need to make sure that it remains secure from people who might wish to start taking a chainsaw to it.
Daphne: Okay. I’ve had a thought. [Laughs] That was a challenging question, about 30 years from now. I’m 70 now. So my mother’s 100, so I may be here for this. My first thought was, I think as we look forward and try to see what it might be like for a profession still active in the year, whatever that is, so 2050-something – I would say we still have a long way to go and I want to see this happen in my lifetime. We need what I would call much deeper accommodation. The Law Firm that I’m now with, Cox & Palmer, which is an Atlantic Law Firm, is quite large over the whole Atlantic Region with many offices. And they just had a Retreat – the first Retreat they’ve had in four years. And I only joined the Firm three years ago, so I was at the Retreat.
And they still had a meeting of all the women lawyers, which was 40 or 50 of them, several managing partners. It was really positive. But the same issues were coming up that we focused on which is, how do you really achieve work-life balance? How do you support a family, having three or four children, or however many they want? And the female lawyers in the family, still having a good chance to stay in practice, return to practice without too much impairment. Not feel, if they wish to be in Private Practice, that they have to find a job in-house as a Lawyer in a Corporation, or not feel that the government is a better place for them. Not to be on – I think they identified this in the Taskforce – is that essentially the Private Firms are providing training and money and articling opportunities and setting up a conveyor belt to move a lot of these wonderful keen young women lawyers and women of different diverse backgrounds, through into the government. Not that there’s anything wrong with the government and it needs brilliant women as well. But there were people moving, not for the fact that they just wished to be perhaps in research or the Military or whatever.
But what I mean is that to this day, the women are still sitting around saying, “Well how can I balance being a mother and a lawyer? And will they still give me my partnership share, if I’m out for two years with the new twins,” or whatever it is. And I don’t sense that coming from my male colleagues as much. I don’t know what others experience, but we haven’t found the right analogy. I think we need new analogies or something for what would really be fair. What do our colleagues in the profession who don’t have families, such as myself, what do we have to commit to do, in respect to our own income, our own security, our own finances, our own earnings, so that the people who are having the children? That we all need to exist in this world. I didn’t have any, so somebody – I remember saying to Melina, one of her three beautiful daughters was going to have to be my ballerina, run my Funeral Home and look after just whatever – because someone who took the trouble to have children, are producing the children that assist us who didn’t have them, and who had a better run in that case.
So that’s what I deeply want to see before I pass away, is that someone who wishes to be in Private Practice and have children, can move up. Maybe the ladder looks a bit different but they won’t still be sitting around saying what I’ve described as having been said recently, which we all know is still having to be said. It’s hard to find the answer to that but it’s a fundamental adjustment that society in general needs, not just our profession.
Do you want to go Sophie?
Sophie: Yes. Maybe because I’m going to continue on what Daphne is saying, about what we would like to see 30 years from now. And what I would like to see is a bigger implication of the profession in Social Justice. Inequality and equality issues are fundamentally issues of Justice and are fundamentally issues that are a concern of all the society. The situation of women lawyers is directly linked to the situation of women in the society. We will not change as a profession as much as we want the profession to change when the society will not follow. And I think that, of course when we’re trying to improve the situation within the legal profession, we are showing a way and as people at the legal profession who are privileged. Every time I feel that I had a bad day for whatever reason, I just reposition myself on this planet and I say, “Oh my God. I’m a woman. I’m now a Judge. I’ve been a Criminal Defense Lawyer all of my practice. I am so, so, so privileged. What am I complaining about?”
But I feel that we outreach enough. I don’t feel that women lawyers think a lot in terms of, how can what we want for the profession can also help the society as a whole? A solution that can be useful for us but that can also be useful for our members of society. When we are solo Firms or small Law Firms, a lot of women are in small working environment raising the same issues. So that will be my wish or I would like us to go. I think that we’re going to make bigger changes, if we do it together and not only within our profession. And I hope that all of us, we’re going to create a new Conference at the CBA – very old Lawyers Conference. [Laughter]
Melina: Sophie you will never be old. I don’t think any of us will be old because you become old when you give up learning. When you stop learning. So yes again, I agree with everything that’s been said. And I used the analogy before that with this report, we took things to the edge. I now wish we had gone over the edge [laughs] a little bit more. And I don’t know why we have to give up on the idea of another Taskforce for the CBA. And maybe it’s not a priority but it would look quite different, but it would be interesting actually to imagine what we would need now, if we were going to have a Taskforce on these issues and how we would approach it, just as a thought experiment. I’m thinking about that now.
So I would say going over the edge and really building on the transformative aspects of the report. So a lot of the report was looking forward but not with a view to transformation. So more about doing things better, being more inclusive within the box, of the ways a legal profession works, or the various sectors of the legal profession work. Some of the recommendations were, “No. Actually, we have to rethink the box. We have to rethink the structure of the practice of law.” Of course the CBA has also done that through its studies on the future of the Practice of Law and so it ties in also to some of the opportunities and challenges of the way the Practice of Law is changing altogether.
And unfortunately much of that is more towards the business side of Law and there’s less and less of the Social Justice side of the Law that Sophie was talking about. I’m not talking about within the CBA. I’m just talking about generally. I’ve always been a Public Interest Lawyer. All four of us have done a lot of Public Interest work in one way or another, where we see that as part of our professional responsibility to either be doing work pro bono, or to be directly involved with projects, or initiatives that try to improve the Justice system here or abroad, or improve the way the Law works, improve the way the Quebec [non-English 00:43:25] Bench works. We’re there. We’re like, “Let’s make it better. Let’s make it better both for our lawyers but more importantly for society in general and for the next generation. And I think that’s something that as we get older, that intergenerational. What kind of legacy we’re leaving, which we’re of course learning a lot from First Nations people in Canada that idea, which is completely natural to them, but is the [unintelligible 00:43:54] of capitalism. [Laughs]
And so it’s hard for that to take traction but it is. That’s one of the things that makes me the most optimistic, is what I see for the first time as real movement towards reconciliation in Canada. And I feel if we take that opportunity as an opportunity to really learn that and learn about the idea of intergenerational responsibility, or our roles as Ancestors, is something that we can take both to that specific conversation, but to everything including something as specific as women in the legal profession.
So that’s what I would like to see. And maybe it’s not a report. Maybe we’re past the report. This is a Podcast, not a report. So maybe I’m a writer and that’s the way I choose to do things. But I think women lawyers will never be equal when they still aren’t safe in the world. And none of us are. I have just finished a big report that involves a mass violence. And that hit home to me in the same way that it did in 1989 with the massacre at Ecole Polytechnique, which was just before this Taskforce got started.
And we’re always just a little bit away. When we look south, the way Pat was saying, we see that even more in so many ways that are so scary. And so it’s not just that we have to at minimum, be vigilant to try to make sure we don’t lose whatever progress we’ve made. But I think we ensure or we give power to that vigilance, by going further in a good way that brings people along with us. So I guess like the [Vanguard? 00:45:59] but maybe through really a lot of discussion around these topics – like this Podcast [laughs] or other initiatives that the CBA might want to consider, or that any of us might want. I know Daphne does a lot – I mean a lot of you do a lot of public speaking too and other forms of engagement that are super important, in terms of actually achieving change. Sorry, that was like a meander from nowhere, but there you go. [Laughs]
Daphne: Any Melina-meander, is valuable
Daphne: And you meandered into my brain a little bit there because one of the things that also struck me when Julia asked about our future in 30 years, is there has to be an improvement in the inequity in practice – and in government services, whatever – between what a lawyer gets paid and what their paralegal gets paid. I’ve always thought, well really if the Firm does well, why do they stay at 54 thousand and 16 partners get an extra 50 thousand and some associates get good – we’re not even get fare to – let’s be honest, in order to be a paralegal to a lawyer or to a Firm, you have to be very smart, very dedicated, very patient and very accurate. These are highly intelligent people that provide us with their supporting services. Even title searches. I mean they make a mistake, we’re in trouble. And we just, “Oh well. We’re sort of in the range. We’ll just leave it that way.”
And when I was in my little Firm with the two or three of us, I was always fighting this with my partner and saying, “No. That’s not fair. If we had this here then they should have.” So I think that’s something. We’re a little blind to our own internal inequities and I don’t think we pay quite as much attention to our immediate supporters, as we sometimes pay to the same situation in the broader society.
Sophie: Thank you Daphne.
Melina: Also National Childcare. [Laughs] I mean there’s so many things to talk about – the things that we mentioned in the report – that are so obvious. Where it’s again – what Sophie was talking about – that it’s not just changing the profession. It’s making sure women have an equal opportunity and equal support to actually participate fully in the economy, should they choose to do so, or should they need to do so.
Daphne: It is a huge privilege for me, and I really mean that sincerely, that the CBA and the profession, is still interested 30 years. There are not many people who write the equivalent of a Royal Commission report and find it still being picked up and read and worked on. And your work, the work of everyone, Rebecca, everyone to keep it front and center and keep looking for the deep analogies and keep going over the edge. You can’t imagine how much it means to us that there are words in there that are still helping.
And I’ll end with one little, tiny thing I remembered about Corrine Sparks, was that when she came to us, she was the first woman Judge, Black woman Judge in Nova Scotia. And she got some really nasty attacks from people saying that she was biased or because she was Black she couldn’t decide a case of a White litigant or defendant and she was very beaten down by that. And then at some point in the Taskforce – I’m not sure when – someone invited her or she chose to go to the American Association of Black Female Judges. And she came back from that, she said, “I never thought I would stand in a room with 320 Black female Judges.” And it just inspired her. Do you remember that? And the energy she had from that was amazing. And that taught me something, that as a White Lawyer and a straight White Lawyer, I never really had to feel that. I never felt out of place. And just watching her, even in the year she was with us, go from being the first alone, attacked, to pretty much more confident, was something I’ve always remembered.
Sophie: [And look at the? 00:50:33] McKinsey report on Equality in the Workplace. It was last year, where McKinsey Firm – a small firm that seems to be around. They made a report of the 500 biggest companies and about equality issues. And of course again, raise was the worst factor. And what they say is that, “At entry level men and women, there’s no distinction. It’s 50/50. But at the first promotion, you have more men promoted. And the higher you get – at the last promotion – it’s 75 percent men. And those are actual numbers.
So when you’re wondering why women lawyers are leaving Law Firms earlier than men, because it’s still the case, well maybe one of the reasons is that they are losing their base of clientele in companies, because there are less and less women that get promoted. So you lose your contact. You lose your reference of clientele so. And just you have this ladder that the higher you go, the more discriminate you are again, which is sad because you always hope that the higher you go, the better your situation is going to be.
Quack. Wrong answer. [Laughter]
Daphne: It might be fascinating to look at, across the board, of the different independent professions which have less of the control that large formal corporations – governments have. Because in the more formal areas in the government, my standard joke is that voluntary measures can be compulsory. [Laughs] Whereas in the Private Practices, whether it’s accountancy I think, or actuarial work, or presuming medicine, architecture, et cetera, where the members of the Private Firms have to pretty well struggle on their own that’s where you particularly find those tendencies to transfer to places where there are more guarantees and perhaps rightly. So wouldn’t that be interesting, is to take all the professions and look across.
Melina: And there’s also a layer of patriarchy. And then there are structural forces like systemic racism and patriarchy, or misogyny that have a compounding effect. So because social psychological studies show you’re more likely to share with someone who’s like you, who you identify with.
Sophie: [Information bias? 00:53:18].
Melina: Yes. So it takes, really active measures, to overcome that and actually really challenging some of those structures, because the transformative part that we were all talking about that we just kind of dance around. Because it’s hard and it doesn’t happen in one step. So it’s multilayer levels of action, because it’s attitude and institutional practices, and structure of the economy, and behaviours. So it’s every level of human interaction and societal interaction. Yes. They are really good models that illustrate that. And I do wish, if we were doing another report, we would have a lot more graphics.
Julia: Thank you so much for letting me interview all those women. I have been very inspired. And there’s this saying that I really like, which goes like that in French is, “[non-English 00:54:41]. In English I guess it goes like, “When spider’s web united, they can stop a lion.” And that is perfect. For me this says it all. So in 30 years, I hope our web will be so huge that it will stop an entire group of lions.
Thank you so much for listening to The Every Lawyer. Please get in touch with us anytime, at podcasts@CBA.org. And a great big thank you to all the women who shared their thoughts and experiences with us for this miniseries. And especially to Rebecca Brown and Kamaljit Lehal, for doing some of the interviews.
We now leave you with these words of wisdom from former B.C. and National WLF Chair, Kathryn Sainty, in conversation with Kamaljit.
Kamaljit: Any other words of wisdom for [laughs] women – women in law, people in law, law profession?
Kathryn: I think we need to be nicer to each other. And that’s one of the reasons I like the mediation because even when lawyers go now on [unintelligible 00:56:04], “We’re here to mediate guys, not to yell at each other.”
Kamaljit: Yes.
Male Speaker: This is The Every Lawyer presented by the Canadian Bar Association.
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