Estimated read time: 6-7 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY — Kimberly Neville is known as a fierce litigator for health care and high-tech companies, translating the legal nitty-gritty into terms juries and judges can understand.
But Neville is also remarkable in another way. A partner at the Salt Lake City office of law firm Dorsey and Whitney, she is one of few women at the top ranks of the legal profession in Utah.
Fewer than 1 in 4 Utah attorneys in the Beehive State are women, compared to 38% across the U.S. And they comprise just 12% of partners at Utah law firms, half the national rate and up just one percentage point from a decade ago, according to a recent report from Utah State University researchers.
"We're just not keeping up," said Neville, who is also the president of Utah Women Lawyers. Her organization commissioned the report that surveyed roughly 2,300 attorneys statewide, with the majority reporting there are no senior women in their offices.
Women of color are especially absent from leadership roles, representing only 1% of law firm partners in the state, the study found.
The picture is largely the same as it was 10 years ago, when the group first took stock of female lawyers' status in Utah.
"We don't have enough leadership to go around, to train the next generation coming up," Neville said. "To me, that's the problem we have to tackle. How do we get enough critical mass, to where we can turn a corner?"
The Utah State University researchers also identified a different, troubling trend in comparing their findings to a 2010 survey.
Significantly more women reported that co-workers' behavior — whether verbal or physical — created an unpleasant or offensive work environment. The rate ticked up to 61%, a jump from 37% in 2010.
Among those women, 44% — up from 27% a decade earlier — said the behavior was serious enough to constitute harassment.
Researchers believe the overall jump is due in part to greater awareness stemming from the #MeToo movement.
Overt harassment isn't all they're up against, however. Women working in law reported being more more vulnerable to penalties for having kids and to "tightrope" bias, facing backlash for being seen as too feminine or on the other side of the spectrum as too assertive or masculine.
Many reported feeling they must prove themselves repeatedly, with pressure to be flawless because any mistake could jeopardize their reputation and chances of moving up.
More women than men said taking family leave could be detrimental to their career, but the gap in Utah isn't as pronounced as a decade ago or as large as the current gender divide on a national scale.
Neville, whose daughters are 9 and 12, was out of the office for roughly a month after having her first child and a bit longer than a week after the second birth, but still worked from home.
"It was to protect my caseload, and to protect my business," she said. "It just was what the job demanded at the time."
The researchers found men and women are now equally likely to desire flexible work arrangements, said Christy Glass, the USU sociologist who led the study. That may be due in large part to younger Utahns entering the profession and wanting to avoid driving themselves into the ground, Glass said, regardless of their gender.
"The smaller that gender gap is, the less likely you're going to see this flexibility stigma," Glass said, referring to the bias mothers can face for requesting schedules that meet their child care demands. "I think that's a really positive aspect of the study. It really does seem as if Utah is moving in a more family-friendly direction."
National research has suggested that workers with flexible arrangements are more productive, more committed to their employers and happier, she said.
Some attorneys who participated in the study said their employers didn't expect them to work around the clock like in other states, a change they attributed to Utah's cultural emphasis on family.
Still, Glass noted, several reported facing pressure to abandon their careers after having children. She and her colleagues interviewed 47 women in law, including judges, as part of the report, and also considered findings from a national 2018 American Bar Association survey.
"We just continued to be inspired by the commitment, the dedication, the talent and the willingness to continue to pursue these incredible careers, despite the biases that they experienced," Glass said.
Ashley Peck, a past president of Women Lawyers of Utah and a partner at the Salt Lake City office of law firm Holland and Heart, said she had hoped to see more progress over the course of a decade. She and female law partners at other firms sometimes joke that they are "unicorns" because their presence is so rare in Utah.
"Reading the results was kind of a gut punch, frankly," Peck said, and the increase in harassment and bias against women jarred her.
Often, Peck said, "it's not the obvious harassment and discrimination, but it's the implicit or insidious experiences that really build up over time and cause women to leave law firms. It's not getting the best assignments and opportunities, not getting invited to networking lunches and client meetings, being talked down to in some way during meetings."
Having more diversity within the legal community is only for the better.
–Gabriela Mena, incoming president of the Utah Minority Bar Association
Those responsible for the experiences may not realize they're doing it, Peck added.
"When experienced repeatedly over the course of a career, they do send a clear message to women that they might not belong. And I think it's a death by a thousand cuts problem," she said.
In her own career, Peck said she's observed that women who assert themselves can be seen as threatening. She's heard term "sharp elbows" employed much more often in describing women, including herself, than male colleagues, she said.
And it's not that women aren't graduating from law school. They make up 44% of graduates.
Gabriela Mena, the incoming president of the Utah Minority Bar Association, said she believes each lawyer in the state should read the 79-page report and is hopeful that greater awareness of the issue could help spur change.
Mena, a criminal defense attorney who was admitted to the state bar in 2019, said she has not confronted harassment within her law office. But she has experienced it in dealing with other lawyers and court staff, including some who mistake her for an interpreter when she enters a courtroom because she's a Hispanic woman, she said.
She recalled an attorney referring to her in a conversation about a case, saying, "Why can't you just get her to go in front of the judge and show some leg?"
Her supervisor responded "that's not appropriate," before she had a chance to speak up, Mena said.
"Having more diversity within the legal community is only for the better," she said.
The report recommended leaders communicate that reducing bias is imperative and take action to do so themselves, like creating bias review task forces and encourage all employees to participate.
It also urged hiring managers to target their recruitment efforts, do blind evaluations and provide more opportunities for mentoring.
Although the pandemic has restricted the sorts of programs the organization can offer, Neville and Peck said they are planning a series of events to address the issues in the new year, including boosting mentoring offerings with a new program for women five to 10 years into their career.
