I made a presentation recently at the Montgomery County Women's Commission, which sponsors a regular series of seminars on divorce and separation. There were about 20 women in attendance for whom divorce is not an academic issue -- they are in the process of getting divorced or thinking about it. The session went well, there were lots of questions and the feedback was positive. I was happy to help, and of course it was not completely altruistic on my part because it is networking like this that can lead to new clients.
I'm often asked because I'm a woman if I more often represent women than men. The answer is no, and in fact my clients are pretty evenly divided between men and women, which I think is true for most attorneys. It's a good thing that representation is not determined by gender, because men would be out of luck, given that the overwhelming majority of divorce attorneys are women.
There is a lot of discussion about why that is so, with explanations ranging from the fact that women have a tougher time in the male-dominated world of corporate law to the Mars-Venus theory that women are more sensitive and caring.
I'm agnostic about most of that. When I got out of law school, I found my first forays into the legal profession stifling and boring. In fact, I fled to cooking school and worked for several years as a pastry chef before returning to the practice of law. When I did come back, I trained for a specialization in family law because it appealed to me as a way to help people at an emotionally trying time in their lives.
Does that mean I fit the Mars-Venus cliche? I also like chick-lit and romantic comedies, but who knows? There are many men who are able and successful divorce lawyers and many women who are hard-nosed corporate lawyers, so I'm not sure professionals are all that easy to categorize.
What I do know is that family law works for me. I find it rewarding and satisfying, especially when alternative forms of dispute resolution like mediation or collaborative help avoid confrontation and ease emotional trauma. To me it's not about men or women, but about people who need help getting through an important transition in their lives.
