Diversity within diversity

One thing I have been thinking about a great deal recently is that how you don’t get the opportunity to see diversity in women, because there are such small numbers of women at most meetings, hearings and events. 

I have practiced in the field for over 20 years but it was only on International Women’s Day last year that I witnessed real diversity in the cohort of women I was with.  I spent the afternoon of International Women’s Day having photos taken for the First 100 years project.  There were queues of women out of the Law Society building waiting for their photos.  All sorts of women, truly diverse.  I think there were over 800 female lawyers who had their photo taken that day.  When we as female lawyers go about our daily lives, we miss that strength in numbers that we see at events like International Women’s Day.  And when you don’t have strength in numbers I believe you get much more gender-conforming behavior – you simply don’t have enough people to show the differences between us, so we are lumped together as female arbitrators, whereas of course we are individuals, we are arbitrators, we are counsel, we don’t need a qualifier in front of our title.

Once there are more of us, and there will be more of us, we will be able to escape the need to conform to a stereotype.  I hope that when there is a critical mass of female arbitrators there will be no need to qualify us based on our sex.  We won’t be female arbitrators, we will just be individuals who arbitrate.