Law People : Law Practice Management, Organizational and Personal Dynamics; Talent Management : Ronda Muir of Law People Management, Inc.

OK, the news has been relentlessly bleak these past few weeks-- Black Thursday followed by just as black Monday through Friday.  To keep things in perspective, here are five great things about the 2009 depression:

1. You don't have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses or the Cravaths... They're not up either.

2. Remember how you always used to say that you'd love to do business development but you just didn't have the time?

3. "I told you things might go to hell in a handbasket."  Even if you didn't quite get the specifics or the timeline right, isn't a global meltdown at least a little gratifying to us world-class pessimists?

4. With the downside not so far down anymore and the upside potentially critically profitable, why not give all those crazy ideas you didn't dare experiment with before--flextime, merit compensation, fixed fee billing--a whirl!

5. What an incentive for change!  The time and tumult generated by the downturn can stimulate a tune-up of both your practice and your firm that will serve you well in the long-term, whether it is totally rethinking and retooling your career, becoming expert in getting your best work done even more efficiently, or redefining what your firm or department is and how it functions.  It is today's inquiries that will fuel your future.

And as an added bonus:

6. Gratitude for your blessings, whatever they are, large and small, never felt better.

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How did women in the spotlight fare in 2008?

Here's a sweeping and eclectic review of women in business, politics and law--Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Governor Sarah Palin, Caroline Kennedy and Michelle Obama, among others--before the year is too far behind us.  Plus an interesting commentary on how we perceive each other.

Women in Business

A New CEO Record. A January 4, 2009 article in USA Today by Del Jones entitled "Women Still Struggle to Get CEO Jobs" reviewed the current challenges for women. Starting off 2009, Ellen Kullman replaced Chad Holliday at DuPont, bringing the number of female CEOs running the nation's largest 500 publicly traded companies to a record 13, one more than 2008. As recently as 1996 there was only one female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, co-CEO Marion Sandler of Golden West Financial, acquired by Wachovia in 2006, in the news recently because of its high level of mortgage defaults.

Does the gender of the CEO make any real difference in performance?  USA Today has evidently tracked the annual stock performance of Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs since 2003, when female CEOs so out-performed men that it looked like there might be a gender advantage, or at least the possibility that the glass ceiling was so difficult to crack, the women who made it to the top were more talented than their male counterparts.

Devastation for All.  But 2008's devastation gave no advantages to anyone.  The chaos in the financial markets claimed three of its highest-ranking female players—Sallie L. Krawcheck, head of Citigroup’s wealth management unit, Zoe Cruz, a co-president at Morgan Stanley, and Erin Callan, chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers.

And female corporate managers fared as badly as the males. With the S&P 500 falling 38.5%, its worst year since 1937, the average large company run by a woman CEO performed 4% worse. The best-performing of women-led companies was Kraft Foods, down 18% under Irene Rosenfeld. "Nine of those 12 companies have now lost money for any shareholder who invested on the day the women got the job,” Jones notes. “The only exceptions: Susan Ivey at Reynolds American and the two longest-tenured women, Andrea Jung at Avon and Anne Mulcahy at Xerox. Avon is up 65% during Jung's nine years, and Xerox is up 1% during Mulcahy's 6 1/2 years. Reynolds is up 21% since Ivey began in 2004." 

The Glass Ceilinged Pay Scale.  What is clear is that women are paid worse than men at the top. A 2008 survey of CEO pay at 3,242 North American companies by the Corporate Library found that female CEOs earned more in base pay, but when cash bonuses, perks and stock compensation were included, women made a median $1.7 million, or 85%, of what male CEOs made.

Women in Politics

Women in the political arena seem assured of arousing strong reactions, reactions that often have little to do with where they stand on the issues.  And Hillary Rodham Clinton is surely the woman of 2008 who raised the banner for women highest, with her long drive toward the White House, but also the one who took the most sustained barrage of counter fire--as to all matters both professional and personal, such as her experience (does being a first lady count?), her honesty and forthrightness (are tears the real test?), and her relationships with her husband (is she true to her man, unable to stand up for herself, or simply astute as to his political usefulness?).

As an example of the broad-based criticism, Caitlin Flanagan in No Girlfriend of Mine, in the November 2007 edition of The Atlantic, had little good to say about Clinton.

Her speaking style: "It’s cringe-inducing to watch her try to talk…there’s nothing more uncomfortable than witnessing someone straining to be natural.”

Her relationship with her husband and reaction to his philandering: "[A]t a La Raza conference… [Hillary] told her interviewer that they should talk like ‘two girlfriends…’ Hillary’s girlfriend-to-girlfriend moment was awkward because if she wanted to talk that way she would have to be willing to let us women in on the big, underlying struggle of her life that is front and center in our understanding of who she is as a woman. Her husband’s sexual behavior, quite apart from the private pain that it has caused her, has also sullied her deepest—and most womanly—ideals and convictions, for the Clintons’ political partnership has demanded that she defend actions she knows to be indefensible…In glossing over her husband’s actions and abetting his efforts to squirm away from the scrutiny and judgment they provoke, Hillary has too often lapsed into her customary hauteur and self-righteousness, and added to the pain delivered upon these women… she has of necessity made herself complicit.”

Even Hillary's treatment of Socks and other pets came under withering attack.  According to Flanagan, as first lady Hillary had taken Socks with her on personal appearances, had retired servicemen and women at the U.S. Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home in Washington, D.C. send out kitty-cat 'greetings' to Socks’s correspondents, and had written about her in Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets, which Flanagan calls "cloying, super-cute, and pun-riddled… and which Hillary, being Hillary, had to turn into a lecture on pet care…the person whose shining example we should all follow being Hilary herself."

In response to rumors that Socks would not make it to Chappaqua, entreaties from the official Socks the Cat Fan Club as to the fate of Socks were reportedly met with a message from Clinton’s office “at once chilly and patronizing… that they butt out,” Flanagan reports. The news came later that Socks had gone to live with a White House staffer. “In Dear Socks, Dear Buddy, we are hectored never to give away a pet, always to regard one as an ‘adoption instead of an acquisition’ and to be forever on guard for its physical safety (cold comfort to Buddy, who had barely sniffed his first Chappaqua crotch before the poor beast ran off and got killed by a car, as had the Clintons’ previous dog, the much-loved but equally ill-tended Zeke).”  According to Flanagan, Hillary "should really be on Cat Fancy’s Most Wanted list.”

Then of course there was Governor Sarah Palin, who leapt on the scene, connecting with a large swath of middle America while enraging those further flung. Toward the end of the year, Caroline Kennedy appeared on the political stage in search of Senator Clinton's seat (before she awkwardly bowed out early this year), and, with Clinton and Palin, formed a veritable troika of controversy over a woman's place in government, and what qualifies her to get there. 

In an article entitled When is it Sexism?, Elizabeth Wurzel claims to have an answer to the question of whether these women were treated unfairly because of their gender. "In Sarah Palin’s case, it was [sexism] (sorta). In Caroline Kennedy’s case, it isn’t. Here’s the difference," she asserts.

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In a February 8, 2009 New York Times op ed column entitled "Mistresses of the Universe," Nicholas Kristof notes that senior staff meetings of Wall Street types resemble “a urologist’s waiting room” and suggests that "Wall Street could use an infusion of women as well as cash." 

Having more women in financial services might counter some of the risk-taking and competitive urges fostered by high levels of testosterone and would improve decision-making, according to the research Kristof cites.  In addition to suffering from testosterone-overload, men are also found in the studies he cites to be “particularly likely to make high-risk bets when under financial pressure and surrounded by other males of similar status. Women’s risk-taking was unaffected by this kind of peer pressure.” 

Of course, women managers also have their Achilles heels. The January 2009 Harvard Business Review includes a 360-degree feedback study by Herminia Ibarra and Otilia Obodaru that finds that female leaders are perceived to be strong in traits such as tenacity and emotional intelligence, but trail men in one important aspect: their superiors, peers and subordinates say that women leaders lack vision.

Better Performance in Diversity. Regardless of our specific gender strengths and weaknesses, the data on the advantages of having diverse management is piling up. Two separate studies in 2008, one by Catalyst, an organization that supports expanded opportunities for women at work, and the other by management consultant McKinsey & Co., looked at gender in management and found that companies with more female executives perform better. 

Why would that be?  University of California-Irvine professor emeritus Judy Rosener says brain scans prove that men and women think differently. Rosener says she's concluded that a company with a mix of male and female leaders, with their differing attitudes regarding risk, collaboration and ambiguity, will outperform a competitor who relies on the leadership of a single sex.

Women aren't better, Rosener says, but they bring to the table something that men don't.

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What happens to our ability to make good decisions going forward when we and all the world are gripped in fear of what we might lose (or already have lost)?

Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University, makes a good case in a recent New York Times article for the profound impact fear has on our decision-making. 

As part of an experiment seeking to replicate on humans the effects of the old electrified Skinner box conditioning, participants were advised that they would receive a shock after a time period of one to 30 seconds. For most people, it was the wait that was most uncomfortable. Anticipating the (mild) pain was worse for them than actually receiving the shock. Everyone preferred to experience the shock immediately rather than wait for it, and nearly a third elected to receive a bigger shock right away rather than wait for a smaller one.

From an economic or policy standpoint, that result is illogical--a bigger shock whenever received is patently worse than a smaller one. What is clear is that fear of the pain—deployed in anticipation of the shock—took such a large toll physiologically and psychologically on the participants that they had less available energy and neural processing power to rationally assess their next move. 

The same parts of the brain activated in this experiment are also active when people must part with something that is valuable to them, and a similar pattern is observable. The implication is that when we anticipate any kind of loss, we exert a lot of energy to hold onto what we have, diverting that energy from endeavors that may well better serve us.

When the fear/loss system is activated, exploratory activity and risk taking are turned off and data processing is impaired.  Of course, if everyone reacts this way, not only is there a downward economic spiral, but the overall level of cognitive functioning also drops. 

Which means that progress is impaired. Just at the time when we are most in need of it.

And the more fear there is, the more fear there is likely to be. 

In a recent double blind study, researchers from Stony Brook University in New York found that participants were actually able to "smell fear" produced on the clothes of 40 volunteers who went on their first skydive, compared to a second group of non-skydivers who had simply been narrated a frightening story.  In an MRI scanner, the participants showed increased activity in their amygdala and hypothalamus in reaction to the fear they smelled--in other words, smelling fear in others engendered fear in the participants. 

Further, the experience of fear (and perhaps anger) primes the over-perception of fearful and anger-inducing scenarios, making us see more fearful scenarios than may actually exist.  In a series of experiments involving a broad range of types of stimuli, happy subjects perceived more happy faces and friendly interpersonal scenes while fearful and angry subjects perceived more fearful and angry faces and hostile interpersonal scenes. Thus, being in a fearful place not only reduces your capacity to best get out of it, it actually magnifies your negative experience by distorting your perceptions.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow said "I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness."

What to do to get out of the grip of fear and into the present? Berns suggests that in order to neutralize that brain drain, you have to reduce the instigators of fear:  avoid the fearmongers, turn off the disturbing news and stay away from the market tickers.  Being more positive (hard for us pessimistic lawyers) and consciously looking for opportunity and how to move forward constructively can take you out of the preoccupations that are distracting you from the important business at hand.

We only have fear itself to fear.

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A 2008 ABA Journal survey, with reponses from more than 1400 women lawyers, produced some interesting results as to who they prefer to work with.  Of the 42% of women who expressed a preference in the gender of colleagues, that preference was different depending on the age of the respondent. 

Female supervisors age 40 and over preferred working with women lawyers because they 1) take direction better (80%), 2) have more discretion (79%) and 3) take constructive criticism better (59%).  

Yet younger female lawyers don’t have the same regard for their older female colleagues. Of those under 40 who thought gender matters, the majority preferred male supervisors for 1) keeping confidential information private (64%), 2) giving better direction (58%) and 3) giving more constructive criticism (56%). 

Theories about the reasons for the difference abound. Some contend that younger women (and also some younger men) are not on the same wave length about the role of work in their lives, and are not willing to make the sacrifices that older women have made.

According to Lauren Stiller Rikleen, who advises law firms about workplace issues, “I'm concerned that more senior women don’t fully understand the profound demographic changes taking place,” demographic changes that affect all young lawyers and override issues of gender. As a practical matter, Arin Reeves, another lawyer who does diversity consulting, notes, the differing generational views of women can mean that women’s initiatives developed by female partners are often not useful to female associates.

The upshot is that there may no longer be “the woman’s situation,” but rather a growing diversity in what women lawyers want, and, given the luxury of having more role models to choose from, a growing diversity of what they can actually have. Perhaps it is worthwhile reminding ourselves that, as we have advocated for years, rather than placing judgment on women generally or on any particular choice, we as women lawyers can and must accept more diversity even among ourselves.

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