Women in IP leadership roles: MIP responds

Last week, in "A woman's place is in ... the lead: thoughts on an upcoming IP Forum", here, the IPKat reviewed a forthcoming International Women's Leadership Forum on Intellectual Property and asked some fairly simple questions about women's leadership and the role of events of this nature. This blogpost has already attracted over 30 comments from readers, reading from the perceptive to the predictably sexist; it has also drawn a fuller response in the form of a blogpost from the event's backers Managing Intellectual Property (MIP) magazine, "Why IP needs events aimed at women", written by MIP's Emma Barraclough. In her piece Emma writes, in relevant part:

"Despite what critics have said, our popular events and network for women working in IP promote inclusive working cultures, networking, career progression and role models. What’s wrong with that? ...

... [H]ere’s why Managing IP decided to launch events aimed at women: we thought it would meet a demand. We looked at the statistics about the number of men and women beginning their careers in law firms and those that made partnership or took on chief IP counsel roles and saw a gap in the figures and in the market.

We don’t know why more women leave the profession than men: perhaps they can’t (or no longer want to) hack it. Perhaps their priorities change. Perhaps they can’t see a way of returning to law after a career break (even as white collar careers might soon stretch to 50 years).

Perhaps they face systemic and unconscious (or conscious) bias that undermines their commitment and ambition. Perhaps they find it hard to find sponsors (not surprising, given the innuendo about "silver spoons" given by "sugar daddies" detailed by one anonymous IPKat commentator). Perhaps they just need to Lean In.

But we do know that many law firms and companies want to limit the number of smart and expensively ­trained staff that choose to leave them and are asking questions about how their culture, practices and policies can help them do that. We thought we could organise events and set up a network that would facilitate the process.

So far our efforts have proved quite popular. Our network has hosted interviews with senior women in the profession and case studies on issues including mentoring and sponsorship. Offering a platform for innovative firms to showcase their own practices and share their experiences helps people at more conservative law firms (of which, we know, there are many) to petition for change.
...
Our events have given a new platform for senior women in the profession to talk about substantive law issues (and with a roster of speakers like this, there is no compromise on quality) as well as talk about strategies for managing career progression. That has proved helpful for senior professionals who want to share ideas about bringing on and retaining junior staff, as well as offering a whole range of role models for younger women.

This role model effect, we have found, has proved immensely popular. There are many successful people who put their career achievements down to individual capability and ambition. In doing so they often dismiss the importance of having role models in their own likeness. In my experience, these people’s role models often look and sound very much like themselves".

It seems to this Kat that the issues which Emma highlights are far from being unique to the various branches of intellectual property practice and would appear to be endemic within legal practice as a whole.  Indeed, he would welcome some statistics on how greatly the ability of women to advance in the profession and assume leadership roles varies between different fields of expertise: he has already in his previous blogpost cited the successful assumption by women of leadership roles in trade mark practice. Why should other fields of endeavour be different?

Never mind glass ceilings, even
glass doors are a problem ...

A proper statistical analysis of entry to the legal profession and progress through it might also highlight other trends which this Kat senses to be the case but cannot verify. These include his impression that the proportion of females studying law and entering the profession has continued to rise and now constitutes more than half; that women are much better represented in many public sector and in-house roles than are men, and that they have more or less created a niche role in law firms for the professional support lawyer or "PSL", a role which in many firms is increasingly demanding in terms of knowledge, skill, effort and responsibility.