Parenting v

KIRK MAKIN

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

April 11, 2009 at 9:34 PM EDT

With her three children approaching school age, lawyer Sarah Hyndman Fitzpatrick felt an urge to resume her career.

She ran smack into the same professional brick wall that has stopped numerous female lawyers before her. "There was absolutely nothing for me," Ms. Fitzpatrick recalled. "Nowhere to go. Nowhere to network. No way to understand what opportunities there were."

It's a familiar story in a profession that has lagged behind most others when it comes to retaining women. The culture of law firms remains firmly rooted in punishing hours, a dominant male hierarchy and a suspicion of women who crave a balance between work and family.

While Ms. Fitzpatrick caught a lucky break - an acquaintance who was winding up her small law practice in estates and wills offered it to her - many others are less fortunate.

"Women are still leaving private practice in higher numbers than men," said Laurie Pawlitza, co-chair of a Law Society of Upper Canada group that recently studied the problem. "We have a long way to go. It is a significant problem, and we have to be smart about responding to it."

In a sign that a change is coming, 52 Ontario law firms have just signed on to a detailed commitment to better accommodate women. Inspired by Ms. Pawlitza's committee, the firms will produce written policies for maternity leave, part-time and flex-time work for women. "We were gob-smacked by the number of firms that wanted to participate," she said. "At least law-firm management is going to be thinking about it."

The law society is also pioneering a policy for granting benefits of $3,000 to sole practitioners who need help paying office rent and overhead while they are on maternity leave, as well as a "locum registry" of lawyers who can take over temporarily.

Simultaneously, the University of Toronto law school will launch a novel program in June aimed at helping women who are planning a return to the legal world. A moving force behind the program, law dean Mayo Moran, said many female lawyers view returning after rearing children as the equivalent of starting out all over again as articling students.

The program, entitled Women In Transition, will emphasize networking and learning new technological skills. Some sessions will include a series of 10-minute, speed-dating-style encounters with female lawyers who succeeded in making the jump back to law, and others will be on updating one's deportment and sense of fashion.

"Men can just buy a decent suit," Ms. Moran said. "But for women, the choices are more complicated. And people notice women a lot more and evaluate them based on whether, for example, they look too feminine or too masculine."

Ms. Pawlitza said that it begins with the fact that lawyers tend to be 30 or 31 when they are called to the bar. "If a woman is going to have children, they will be doing it at exactly the time they are entering and learning about private practice."

She said most large firms also have no policies for filling in while woman are gone, let alone to attract them back: "It's as if every time a woman has a baby, it's the first time."

Women who practise alone or in small firms lack unemployment benefits or someone to step in and service their clients, Ms. Pawlitza said. "There's a woman in Kingston who had to take her brand-new baby to the office to meet with clients the same day she got out of hospital," she remarked. "She was a sole practitioner and had no supports in place."

Another lawyer, Carrie Hardie, said she resigned from a large Toronto firm in 2005 to have children. Attempting to return to the profession almost three years later, she was frank about her unwillingness to work the sort of killer hours that big firms expect of their associates.

"After a few months of being short-listed and not picked for jobs, I started to think that maybe I should just tell people: 'Okay, I'm ready to go back hardcore,'" Ms. Hardie said in an interview.

She stuck to her guns and eventually found a position at the University of Toronto where she can work from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m. "At a law firm, it's all about billing," she said. "I didn't think that I would be able to progress through the ranks like other lawyers who didn't have to leave at all."

"A lot of male lawyers have told me that they were extremely unhappy about losing these really high-calibre people. Another thing is that lots of senior partners have daughters who are now trying to work out these same, anguishing work/life choices. They feel keenly their daughters' talent, and how wasted it is."

Male Lawyers are Parents Too - More propaganda from the feminist camp that alludes only female lawyers are parents and suffer disadvantages of parenthood.

Notice that there was no mention of Father Lawyers? This article simply alludes that only mothers care for kids. When are we going to hear the Father's side of the issue?

Male lawyers also take paternity leave, they also return to work and "have to start over again" except, male or female, there is no difference in the difficulties encountered and, after some time practicing law, its not that difficult to 'return to work' and to suggest that its like "articling again" is ludicrous.

Many lawyer parents, male or female, choose to work part time, and their law firms accommodate them.

Law firms that demand standard high "billable hours" have little real interest in clients or ethics.

Lawyers who believe in being parents tend to have higher ethical standards and make better lawyers and provide better service who end up with better clients.

Good lawyers of any gender are always in demand, they turn away clients in droves and there is no real reason why their law firms cannot accommodate part time hours.

In family law, female lawyers are sought after by both genders, both men and women are frequently under a delusion that having a female lawyer is some kind of advantage.

www.OttawaMensCentre.com

"She pushed the child out of her body"... Wow, you mean she did not choose a C-section? You mean that women are incapable of returning to work days or weeks after what is commonly called "child birth" that you call "pushing out of her body".

If you think the groans of the pain of labour are painful, they are next to nothing when compared to the never ending grief that fathers suffer when a mentally ill violent woman gets a feminist lawyer who will personally fabricate evidence who calls up her friendly judge to issue an order for "summary judgment" when a string of other judges ordered a trial.

Ontario Family Law is a facade, with a very thin portrayal of justice and equity when in fact its a sick, corrupt system that gives generally mothers anything and everything they ask for and, sends men in their droves to jail for failing to pay imaginary astronomical figures of income that never existed or will never exist.

It also attracts Feminist Lawyers like Lesley Kendal, now a partner at Cunningham Swan of Kingston who have no hesitation of providing false and misleading evidence, to obstruct justice, to the courts to give them what they could not get in a fair objective impartial hearing which we all know is entirely unlikely in the Corrupt Family Courts of Ontario. Lying Feminist Lawyers personally fabricating evidence makes those odds even more remote.

www.OttawaMensCentre.com

Parenting v. working