 So it's great to have you all here this afternoon. Tonight's this afternoon's lecture, I think, marks the end and the beginning of something very important. In 2017, at our annual Women in Robes event, Judge Vogel, referred from the podium to an abandoned initiative of one of my predecessors, Harvey Rishikov, to bring together the first women admitted to practice law in Rhode Island. And Judge Vogel was making the point that Rhode Island was rather slow on the uptake that until about 1970, the women of the Rhode Island Bar were a small enough group to sit around a single table. And in fact, fewer than 30 women were admitted to the Rhode Island Bar between the first admitted, Ada Sawyer in 1920, and 1970, 50 years later, 30 lawyers. So our crack library staff got on this project. And in 2019, we dedicated a plaque with a list of the names of the first 176 women admitted to practice law in Rhode Island. It was a truly magical evening because so many of those women were here, and they spoke directly to and with our students. And so if you find your name on that list, if you are a first woman, could you please stand so that we can recognize you tonight again? So the research that went into creating that list resulted in the discovery of the story of Dorothy Crockett, the first African-American woman admitted to practice in Rhode Island in 1932. That story had been lost to history, and our staff helped tell that story in September joined by Dorothy's daughter, who also had not heard the story. We dedicated a classroom in Dorothy's honor. Throughout this process, there's been a palpable sense of enthusiasm from many, many corners. And a steering committee made up of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other leaders in the legal community came together and decided we should create a lecture series. And that lecture series should keep a focus on the progress of and challenges faced by women in the legal profession. If you're a member of the steering committee, could you please raise your hand and accept our thanks for your work? Special thanks to Veronica Paricio for sharing the Lectureship Subcommittee of the Steering Committee. So that brings us to tonight and to this inaugural lecture, the beginning of a new tradition for this law school. Tonight would not have been possible without the financial support of first women Louise Durfee, Nancy Mark Smith, Carolyn Harvey Thompson, and Merth York. I don't see is Nancy Mark Smith here. Please, Nancy, stand. And thank you for your generosity. I also want to recognize and thank the law firm of Sir Venka Green and Dusharm for their financial support. Three of their lawyers said they were going to be here this evening. They may be on their way. They are on their way. We'll meet them later. But thank them for their support. And it gives me great pleasure to recognize our presenting sponsor, the law firm of Adler Pollock and Sheehan. AP&S also sponsored the first women dedication event. And they've been with us side by side along the way. I want to welcome their lawyers here tonight, Jamie Bichant, who's an alum. Elizabeth Siever, who is an alum. Kelly Kincaid, who's not. And it's my great pleasure to welcome to the podium another alumna of Roger Williams, Nicole Benjamin, a partner at AP&S, a member of our board of directors, a truly outstanding lawyer. And Nicole, it's going to bring greetings from the firm. Nicole. Good evening. It is my pleasure to be here this evening for the Women in Law inaugural leadership lecture. For me and my colleagues at Adler Pollock and Sheehan, supporting this event was a natural extension of our celebration last year of First Women. And at AP&S, we're lucky to count many of those First Women as our own. They are either current or former colleagues. And I cannot begin to tell you how much I personally have benefited from the paths that those leading women paved. I'll be brief because I know you're all as anxious as I am to hear from Dean Lester. But being here in this room tonight brings back so many memories. 17 years ago, just yesterday, I sat in these seats first time for my first days of law school orientation. And it was there that I met a classmate who remained not only a lifelong friend, but who was a constant cheerleader and a supporter of myself and many other women at a time when that wasn't talked about much. And I don't need to tell all of you how competitive law school is. And it was then. But my friend saw that there was a place for all of us to shine. And while I poured my energy into the Law Review and into Moot Court, she poured her energy into the Honors Program and the Student Bar Association. And we supported one another. When I traveled to Houston to argue in a Moot Court competition, she hopped on the next flight and was there to support me. When she ran for Student Bar Association President, I was there to support her. Now, many years have gone by since each of us supported each other in law school. And since then, we've supported and mentored many other women. But last month was particularly special for both of us. My good friend and I sat in Judge Stern's courtroom, opposite one another at counsel table. We were there to argue cross motions for summary judgment in a contentious high stakes employment case. And as I sat there, memories of my first year law school legal methods arguments came flooding back, arguments that took place in this room. And I looked at my good friend and couldn't help but think, we've made it. We made it because we supported one another. So someone once said that true leaders build bridges for one another. I hope that all of you build many bridges, especially for the women in your lives. So on behalf of myself and my colleagues at Adler Pollock and Sheehan, thank you. So it's my pleasure to do a couple of introductions here. First of someone that many of you know, Professor Emily Sack, who among other things is the faculty advisor to our women's law society. Emily's a graduate of NYU law school but has a connection not only to Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree, but the law school as well, where she was a visiting fellow in 2010 at their Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. Emily clerked for a federal district judge in Manhattan after graduating from NYU, practiced law in Manhattan and then spent several years working at the Center for Court Innovation, a think and do tank that designed and piloted various court reform programs. We were fortunate enough to attract her here, where she has been teaching since 2001, a cluster of courses mostly focusing on criminal law and criminal procedure. She's a nationally recognized expert in the area of domestic violence and is a co-editor of the leading case book on the subject. She has been named distinguished research professor here and has been selected by the graduating class as professor of the year. She is the complete package. So I first met Dean Lester about 20 years ago when I was editing a volume of what we were calling working papers for the NYU Center for Labor and Employment Law. She was on the faculty at the time at UCLA and our exchanges were limited to email and phone. Nevertheless, I was struck that in addition to this formidable intellect, Gillian was an extremely engaging communicator with what on reflection I can describe as a rare level of emotional intelligence. She's authentic, she's humble, she's generous, empathetic, had an impressive sense of humor. Her principal subject areas at the time and as an academic included employment law, labor law, distributive justice in the welfare state, a very Canadian subject and paid family leave. So it came as no surprise to anyone that she was hired away from UCLA by Berkeley and there she started to develop an administrative portfolio as co-director of the Center for Health, Economic and Family Security and then as associate or vice dean for the law program, the JAD program and for curricular planning. In 2013 she was named interim dean of the law school, a position she held for approximately a year and a half and then effective January 1st, 2015 she became the 15th dean of Columbia University School of Law, only the second woman in Columbia's 170 year history to serve as dean. Now as luck would have it for me, we were part of the same ABA baby dean school cohort in 2014 and I was pleased to be able to connect with her again and to witness on display many of the characteristics I remembered from those many years ago. She stood out as one of the sharpest and most inclusive and collaborative members of the group and one could have excused her for not being collaborative and instead for being preoccupied because then we're talking tonight about leadership after all. She was about to take on one of the most complex and highest profile jobs in legal education. In 2018, Columbia Law School had operating revenues of $173 million, which really makes her job more like the job of the president of a small university. The law school received more than $48 million in new gifts and pledges in 2018 alone and its endowment sits at about 450 million. There are 146 members of the full-time faculty. 1200 JD students and about another 300 master students including those in Columbia's renowned LLM program for foreign students. That's approximately 120 more full-time faculty than we have and over a thousand more students. Columbia has a truly comprehensive curriculum that is both broad and deep. So it's a huge job, huge job. Moreover, the footsteps she followed are imposing indeed. One of her predecessors as dean went on to become an associate and then Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. You may have heard of him, Harlan Fiskstone. Alumni of the Law School include a couple presidents of the United States, nine Supreme Court justices, and a number of US Attorneys General, Solicitors General, Cabinet Members, Senators, Representatives, and through the LLM program leaders in the public and private sectors around the globe. Her deanship has been marked by growth in those programs and a renewed sense of momentum along with, and she may share some of this with us this evening, the expected but still unwelcome and challenging surprises of deaning. Jillian and her husband have two children, one of whom we can probably thank for her presence here this evening who is a freshman at Brown. So please join me in welcoming Dean Jillian Lester. Thank you, Michael. Well, as Dean Yonasky just said, you are the second woman dean of Columbia Law School, and I think an appropriate first question would be, when did you realize that you wanted to be a dean and did you always know that this is where you were headed? Well, first of all, let me just thank Dean Yonasky for a lovely introduction. And just for the record, I would have come with or without a daughter at Brown, thrilled to be here, especially hearing the story of the creation of this lecture series, which we've turned into a fireside chat, but thank you so much all for welcoming me here. I'm really delighted to be the inaugural guest. So, you know, you imagine in your mind the picture of a person who rises to a role of leadership and you imagine a grand story where, you know, one day, standing on the Potomac or, you know, graduating from high school, they knew they wanted to be X or Y leader, and my story isn't like that at all. I, it's a funny story. I was, as Dean Yonasky mentioned, I was an associate or vice dean, sort of the person who sits below the dean and does a lot of the internal work of the school, making sure that people show up for their classes and that everybody gets through the tenure process and so forth, and I'd been in that role for four years at the time that the dean announced or took a leap of absence and I stepped into the role of interim dean as a favor just to keep the ship running when he took some time away from the dean's ship because of illness, and then it became clear that he was not gonna come back and so we were in a dean's search at Berkeley. And I had a couple of really good friends. They had children the same age as ours, two male friends on the faculty, and we all had children who were right around the same age, elementary school, middle school children. We camped together in the summertime. We had weekend dinner parties and we were all sort of mixed up with one another in friendship, and shortly after the dean's ship, it was announced that there was gonna be a search for a new dean, I was carrying on with my life. I realized my kids were this age and there's no story in which I became a dean with an 11-year, a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old or whatever their ages were around that time. It just didn't seem like the right time to do that kind of thing, and moreover, I didn't see myself as a dean. It wasn't part of my picture of myself. And my two friends, I learned about a week or two into the process, both threw their hats in. So I paused and I thought, we're all in the same moment in life. We're all in the same, our circumstances are absolutely parallel. We're at the same stages of our careers. I'm the vice dean. And yet, even then, I didn't see myself as the dean. And it took having several people knock on the door of my office and say, why aren't you putting your name in the hat? Where's what's going on? And it was only after I'd had several conversations, and it took a couple of weeks that I decided that I would indeed become a candidate for the deanship. But it was, I mean, I think it's an interesting story, and I think it's a story that is true for many women, that actually I read a story about Nancy Pelosi. This is something I've thought about for a while, but I was just reading something within the last week that Nancy Pelosi had a similar story that other people told her they thought she would be good in politics, or that she would be good rising to the next level of politics. So yeah, it took having people suggest to me that I might be a good dean before I started to take it very seriously, and then it also took the cold reality of the fact that there were two peers of mine who hesitated not at all. And I started to think about the gender dynamics there, and that was part of what also spurred me to decide to throw my hat in. So given that it was somewhat unexpected, I guess, for you to end up moving in the direction of Dean, did you feel trepidation and taking it on? Oh yes. You don't mind? Yeah, I felt a lot of trepidation, given where I'd started with this. You know, in my own mind, I didn't fit the profile of the dean, and I worried about not succeeding in the role. I worried about family life and whether this would tear us apart because I'd be working as a busy dean while I had kids at home. So I had a lot of fears about both my skills and abilities as well as the stakes of taking on a role like that. But you know, one of the things that I've come to recognize over the years is that so many of the things that I've ended up feeling were the most worthwhile were things that I was afraid of at first. That I feared somehow, and I at some point made a decision that might have felt rash at the moment to just leap, and I leapt with butterflies in my stomach. But so many of those things have been the most worthwhile things I've done, you know, especially looking back to how hard it was to take that first step. And I feel like that's a lifelong lesson that many of the things that are most worth doing are the things that you feel like it's just a little bit of a reach. And if you make that reach and you manage to scramble up that hill, the sense of satisfaction and growth that you feel is tremendously rewarding. And I think you had mentioned back in that interim dean period that apart from the encouragement of the two colleagues applying for the job that there were other people who said to you, knocked on your door and said you should be applying, et cetera, so that encouragement was very important to you. And I think you've mentioned to me, maybe you could talk about how mentorship has been so important to you in your career. Yeah, I've had wonderful mentors through my career and I think the story, again, I think the opening story is a very good example of having somebody else provide the encouragement and see something I did not see myself about myself. I actually have a, the summer after my 1L year, I worked in a law firm working in a labor and employment practice in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada. And I remember, I think it's really remarkable that I still remember this story 33 years later. There was a woman at the firm and there weren't very many women at the firm at the time and she was one of the small number of women at the firm who were partners. She's now a judge of the British Columbia Court of Appeal which is the highest court in British Columbia, Mary Saunders. She knocked on my door and I was in a little cubicle working away on my, whatever I was working on. And she had a piece of paper in her hand and she slid it across my desk and it had about five names on it. And I said, what is this for? Thank you. And she said, I'm gonna make a suggestion and you can take it if you want but I'm gonna make a suggestion that these are people you might, while you're here this summer make an effort to knock on their door and ask them if you can buy them a sandwich or a coffee. And don't say lunch because what's gonna happen is they're gonna buy you lunch and you don't want them to feel like they're gonna have to buy you an expensive lunch. So just a sandwich, just something very modest and it'll give you an opportunity to talk with them and tell them a little bit about yourself and also to learn a little bit about their careers. And what I later would learn is that the people that were on that list were people who were very influential in the firm and she was giving me the advice of in a really lovely and informal way of how to make an approach to somebody who could, you know, from whom I could learn something and who could tell me something about the firm. She gave me another piece of advice as well that has always stayed with me and that is she said, so when you walk into a room, slow down, there's a meeting you're going into. It's just maybe later on in life you're gonna be increasingly asked to come to meetings and sit around a table and deliberate or decide or discuss issues, slow down before you go into the room, put your shoulders back, take a deep breath, stand tall and walk into the room as though you belong in that room. And don't sit at the back, sit at the table. So 32 years later, I remember this like it was yesterday. I was, you know, I was 23 years old and that was the power of having a woman I looked up to as a mentor to me and giving me some simple advice but it was so formative for me and I still do it. Before I walked into, before I walked into this room I slowed down, put my shoulders back and I took a deep breath and that's something that I learned from a mentor and it's really vitally important. There are people who are role models and I have role models as well. My first dean at UCLA was a woman, Susan Prager. And while I wouldn't describe her as a person who mentored me in the same way, she was an example for me and I, it's indelibly imprinted in my brain that I had a woman in that role of leadership in the first job I had of this professional career. So I really think that mentors are critically important and I also think that mentors are particularly important for women where sometimes it does take that tap on the shoulder and that piece of encouragement. And by the way, we have many people in the audience who have been great mentors to many of our students and I'm looking right straight ahead at my judges friends over here and many others. You receive it and you pay it forward and it's a blessing to generations of women. I know leadership in general is a very important concept for you and particularly the challenges for women and underrepresented groups and I know you have been thinking about that at Columbia so maybe you could tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, we've established dedicated leadership education at Columbia. It's something that's been taught at business schools for many years but so many lawyers go into positions of leadership and yet for a long time, law schools didn't specifically teach leadership. So now we have a marquee course as well as a number of laboratory courses that are experiential courses in which we teach leadership skills, a whole variety of characteristics that leaders tend to have. So many of them are teachable skills. Now we also have a mentorship program. We have a fellows program, a whole constellation of things that are designed to also provide students with opportunities to demonstrate and test their skills at leadership while they're in law school. But one of the things that I think is really important, the leadership program was not designed specifically for the purpose of encouraging underrepresented people or women into roles of leadership. And yet it's one of the things that I find to be particularly inspiring about the program and motivates me in driving it forward at the school. You know I think that there are kinds of leadership and kinds of confidence that men are more likely to have than women focusing on gender and I think the same is true across groups that are majority groups versus underrepresented groups where what we see is data to show that men speak more and this has been shown over and over again that men speak more in class but when they do speak, they speak for longer. The same is true in the profession among meetings of lawyers within firms. Men in the firm speak more and longer. It reflects a kind of, it seems to be present without somebody tapping them on the shoulder and saying I wanna encourage you and let you know that we'd welcome having you speak. So one of the things that I think that leadership education can do is it can level the playing field between those who sort of carry with them a natural sense of their own capacity for leadership and those who don't naturally imagine themselves to be in roles of leadership. If everybody can be taught the same skills, then perhaps by the time they leave Columbia Law School we'll have done some work towards finding opportunities for both education as well as opportunities for women as well as people of color to demonstrate through projects that they've engaged in in law school. Outside the classroom setting where you're raising your hand and you're answering the professor, there's another modality in which to show your capabilities. So I think it's been a really important program for that purpose. And I know obviously you've thought for yourself about the qualities that are necessary to lead effectively and I think it would be helpful for people to hear how you have done that because I know it isn't necessarily the norm in deanship, so. Yeah, I mean I think there's an archetype of, and I will say that I myself had that archetype in my mind back with that first anecdote that I told about who would be the next dean. I myself have an image in my mind of, I mean that image has changed over time but I came to the table initially with an image in my mind of a person who had a lot of independence, kind of operating solo. I had an image in my mind of people who give sort of transcendent speeches, standing up in a podium with a big vision and a big voice, somebody who makes decisions independently and decisively. These are the, this is the way I, this is what you think of and you just watch movies and TV and it's an image that's really, I think is hard to dislodge. And you know what I've learned over time is that leadership comes in many, many different forms and very, very powerfully in other forms so that a vision can be articulated quietly as well as loudly that a inspiration can be delivered and encouragement and mentorship can be achieved in ways that don't necessarily involve the kind of the lone iconic person at the front of the room standing alone but working through listening, through deep collaboration, through give and take, through I think some of the most powerful kinds of leadership involve a quiet assist providing the support for somebody to be able to go out themselves in front of it that you were there and sort of giving them the foundation that enabled them to stand up for themselves or enabled them to find their voice. And so as I've been in a role of leadership and I've interacted with other leaders over time, increasingly the list, the list gets longer and longer of qualities that are outside the archetype but that can be tremendously powerful skills for a leader to have and can be alternative ways of bringing people together towards a common goal. And I think you talked initially when you were talking about considering a deanship, you were concerned about the impact it might have in your family life and I know you've made some rules like I said I would say for your deanship, can you talk a little bit about those because I think it would be interesting. Yeah, yeah, so I was worried and I had been an interim dean for a couple of years and I quickly found myself in a vortex of constant oxygen debt and so when I decided to put my name in for a deanship permanently, I was pretty clear from the beginning that I had children who were in elementary and middle school years and I asked about, and I know that not everybody can do this but I committed to not trying to not to go out for evening events more than two nights a week, wanting to be at the dinner table for the other nights of the week and I also did something that at the time I did it was difficult, the person who had been the assistant to the dean prior to me advised me against doing this. Once you become a dean everybody sees your calendar at least I have half a dozen people who have access to my calendar electronically and I asked that when I had a meeting, a parent-teacher meeting or some kind of a school related thing that we call it what it was in the calendar rather than saying I had a meeting or an appointment that I had a parent-teacher meeting that it was back to school night because I wanted to send the message to the people who were reporting into me and the people who were, I thought inevitably gonna be following the model that I set that this was part of life and that one can, if we're gonna be serious about balancing families with jobs that are very busy that we need to be able to have frank conversations about what that involves and the ways in which we can't always be always at the workplace and have invisible meetings that involve our children or that involve family commitments. So I made a very intentional choice to do that. Did you get any kind of backlash on that? I got a lot of thanks. Oh really, no. I got a lot of thanks. It didn't come immediately but over this next several years people would quietly say to me, you know, I noticed. I noticed. Yeah. And you mentioned that obviously not every person and particularly young lawyers, young women lawyers starting out would have the ability to shape their own schedule and say I will not do X or whatever. But do you have advice for young women lawyers who can make some kind of work family balance or other choices that will make their lives more whole while still achieving success in their careers? Yeah, I mean I guess I really do want to say that for me it was in that second round when I decided I wanted to be a dean permanently that I made a couple of different choices around things that we all read about that we're supposed to do. You know, that we're supposed to sleep more than four hours a night. You know, I really do sleep. I really do sleep seven hours a night. I mean every once in a while, I have a five and a half hour night and I do sleep and I exercise. I just make myself, I just do. I just force that and I'm not a person who before I became a dean habitually exercised all the time but I realized that you step into a role where it can really consume you entirely and you have to make some very intentional choices and I talked about being home for dinner and showing up for my kids things. I don't sign up for the parent teacher association but I do go to the musical productions. I always, I make sure I'm there. I'm there for the soccer game on the Saturday. So, but the other thing I will say is more about once you get inside the workplace and one of the things that I remember from when I was a starting faculty member at UCLA, before I came on the, before I had my first child at UCLA, the pattern for women on the faculty had been that they would give birth and then they would be back in the classroom within a few weeks after that. You know, there would be some kind of accommodation for missing a few classes for the actual birth. So the dean proudly told us, you know, it was at lower at UCLA that she broke water in a faculty meeting. I swore that I would not follow that particular example. In any event, there were three of us who were about the same age cohort, young faculty members who were women, untenured. And we, one of the things that we did was we found that doing something collectively helped us in ways to do things that we wouldn't have been able to do alone. And I do remember going to see the dean together with two other women and asking if we could have a policy to have a semester, a semester's leave after giving birth, both to be able to spend time with the child but also because you don't just miss the classroom but you also miss scholarship and then you're set back relative to your peers who don't miss that time. So by going and doing it together, we were able to accomplish something. We achieved what we asked for and so I was one of two women who were the first UCLA faculty who had a one semester leave when I had my first child. And that was really that we were able to do something collectively that we weren't able to do individually. And talking about the challenges for women in law, as you know, there's been this persistent problem where though women have been at least half of the law school class for many years, in fact our entering class right now at Roger Williams is 62% women. And yet, and yet for partnerships, equity partnerships at law firms, the number seems to hover around 20% women. And so I wondered if you had any thoughts as to what are the challenges and the barriers and what should be done about it? To solve the problem. Do you know? We'll solve it, yes, tonight. So I'm a dean of a law school and I don't live within law firm life but I do meet very regularly with the mounting partners of law firms. We commiserate about the challenges of our jobs which are actually much more similar than they are different. And I ask them questions about how they are taking on the biggest challenges in the profession. And many are focusing very closely right now on the question of how to, not just how to hire a diverse group of lawyers, both women and minorities, but also how to retain those lawyers as the years pass. And there are a number of things that I think have been, you know, have been working better than what we were doing in the past, even though I think there's a long distance to travel. So those include a longer partnership track. So that sort of surprised me when I first talked with a managing partner of Scadden about that, Scadden Arps. And what I learned from talking to him was that, and it's obvious once you think about the sort of the, you know, just the life stage that a person, a woman leaves law school and starts practicing law and you know, maybe she's 24 or so and then six years later or so as you're sort of approaching what used to be the time when you would be considered for partner, she's 30 or so. That's about the time when you start having a doctor who's for older women, not quite. But it's often the time when people might start thinking about having families, at least you're entering into the decade when people might start having families. And especially if you weren't, people go to law school a little bit later in life now. So especially if you're not just 30 but you're 35. Often the time, exactly when the partnership decisions getting made is the time when women are talking with their partners about whether or not they want to have a child. And so extending the partnership track, the duration of the period of being an associate a little bit longer has been found to be a way of helping women get through the period which they might have a child during that period but then there's some ramp left on the other end. They don't just disappear right at the time that it's time to come up for partner. You can have a child come back, be back on the track and be considered after you've been able to get your ducks lined up again. A couple of other things that have been, I thought were, have been found by researchers in business and law both about the way that evaluation happens of women versus men. So there's a lot of ways that bias, implicit bias can creep into the process of making assessments of people's performance. So the kinds of descriptions that are used for men are often things like fire in the belly and the descriptions that more frequently come up for women who've been performing well include things like well organized. So there's a phenomenon where a lot of times women in law firms end up doing a lot of the housekeeping work, the organizational work, keeping the case on track, meeting the deadlines, getting all of the organizational details together and making sure that everything stays on track and accurate but those kinds of qualities are not necessarily rewarded at the same level that boldness and fire in the belly are rewarded. And so best practices in many of the law firms that are I think most successful in both recruiting and retaining women include having somebody who does whose job it is to intervene in looking at the kinds of descriptors and the ways that the weight that's given to different kinds of qualities as they're being evaluated. And another thing that's along the same track, along the same lines is making sure that when tasks are doled out as part of a team that men and women equally get the housekeeping tasks. So while people might say about the woman who was a very organized member of the team, gosh she doesn't seem to have fire in her belly. The question isn't necessarily also asked about the man who's got fire in his belly. Was he well organized? Did he meet the deadlines? Did he come with all of his documents in order? So the task is to make sure that everybody's responsible for all of those things and if you don't perform on any of those kinds of qualities, then it's weighted equally or if you perform well on any of those qualities, it's also weighted equally. I think that's really powerful. Yeah, and I'll just make one more point actually which is tied in with the point that I made earlier about the power of a collective. There are some committees in law firms that are very powerful and other committees in law firms that are less powerful. And having, for example, on the compensation committee, women in numbers is really important. So rather than having on the 12 person compensation committee one woman or two women, having four women or five women or women that are at least proportional to the number of women who are entering into the law firm's ranks, rather than just choosing to have, say, well, for example, there may be fewer women who are partners than there are men who are partners and so you may need to have disproportionate number of women from the partnership ranks who are on the compensation committee in order that they can speak with a more unified voice. Well, I know we're running short of time and I know there are people who want to ask questions so I have just one final question for you. What's the one hope that you have, so summarize into one answer, that you have for the next generation of women attorneys? You know, I think that ties in some many of the themes that we've been talking about. It's really about confidence. It's about what I wish for the next generation is that they have a deep belief that they have a place at the table, that they have the confidence to know when they walk into the room, that they have a place at that table. They don't need to sit in the back row. Thank you, thank you so much. And now we do have a few minutes for questions, so I'd ask if anyone has a question to please identify yourself so that Dean Lester knows who you are or I will call you out. Because I know all of you, all right. Yes. It's brown admission, but I did not meet your daughters. I'm wondering if you have any insight on what the landscape looks like in the actual admission office, particularly for underrepresented minorities, for women, perhaps first generation students who are going through this college happen that long to grab their professional law school. What kind of trends have you seen in the observation? I would just be curious to see, to hear a little bit more about that. Yeah, well, women are applying to law school in force. I'd say that, and I'd say also that at this particular moment, some people have different terms for it, but the complexity of political life right now has led many people who want to be change agents to apply for law school, where they might, 10 years ago, have applied to public policy school or chosen some other path. They're coming to law school. And one of the things, I sit on the executive committee for the Association of American Law Schools, and we did a study of people going college students as well as high school and middle school students. And one of the things that we learned from that survey that we did, was that women and people of color are more likely to wanna go to law school to do work that is gonna provide public service. And so, with this surge of people coming to law school because they wanna have the tools to be able to make social change, we're also seeing a very, very rich pool of both minority students and women students who wanna come to law school, though I will say that women have been equal in numbers in applicants for quite a long time. So it's exciting, it's an exciting time. Yes? Even though we're in the years of company people ask, and so what do you think society can do to move away from that narrative? And what do you think somebody in my position in my co-classmate, what do you think we can do when we answer the what was to change the narrative? Yeah, I mean I think it really is an important question to ask yourself how you can be empowered. And I talked about the sort of working in numbers, coming together with peers, forming strong relationships with your peers, sharing stories with each other about your experience. And so that you have a reality check with others about something that you might have experienced that created a bottleneck for you where you realized how do I do both of these things at the same time? How do I fulfill my obligations in the workplace as well as my obligations at home? And so I'd say that working collectively and talking through and sharing your stories and then finding mentors and finding sponsors and people who you've cultivated as people who can be advisors and coaches to you and trying to describe as clearly as you can the ways in which those challenges emerge with the safety of those numbers, I think is incredibly helpful. But I wanna say that I wanna take your question, I wanna turn it on its head. I don't think you should have to carry all the water. You know, I do think it's critically important for all of us, many of us in the room are people who've been at this for a while. We've gone through this path at different times with our own challenges, but I really feel the incredible sense of responsibility to try to be a mentor who doesn't measure the challenges of the next generation by the yardstick that I had when I was going through the process. If there's gonna be change, you need to be able to look at somebody who's struggling today and refrain from saying, well, when I was at that stage, I had a stiff upper lip. I figured out how to make it work. You've got to find some balance between mentoring people to have a toughness and resilience and recognizing that progress is gonna require that we change the yardstick across time in the way that we mentor and in the way that we provide, the way that we stand up for the struggles of people who come behind us. Yes? So, this is Lynette Layman-Jer. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Prominent way. Prominent way. Prominent way. Yes? Like the last one. Absolutely. And have you noticed is there a gender issue there and how one gets people to yes? Mm, I love fundraising, I really enjoy it. And it's, I'm pausing because I'm, boy, I'm, I don't feel, so I'm mostly raising funds from men. That's just a fact. I have a number of women who are philanthropic in my pool of donors, but just the demographics. I mean, they're just, by the time people get to the point in life where they're able to give at the level that, you know, that I'm meeting with them, they're a generation of people where there weren't that as many women in law school as there were men. So, I'm not targeting men and not women. It's just. I find, you know, I come with business on my mind. You know, I come to meet with people and what I talk about is a shared vision that, you know, I have for the law school and I hope they'll have for the law school. And I think I'm definitely building relationships with people and I'm building a sense of shared purpose with people. And it's a very much an interpersonal dynamic that's part of that. It's an authentic sense of this is what I care about and I want you to care about it too. And I hope you do. I usually have a development person with me and so I probably haven't. I don't go to drinks late at night with donors. You know, it's breakfast. And it's breakfast usually with my director of development. And so I guess I'm answering this question very slowly because I'm thinking in real time because I want to, it's an important question. I feel that I don't use gender. I don't use my being a woman in raising funds from a man. I don't use it as an instrument. And I feel that I have very professional interactions but I do observe that I've created the conditions for, you know, breakfasts with a third party for a very professional kind of interaction. I'm going to think more about that. With politics, but that's always been one of the big issues that seems to be more men in politics and one of the big issues in politics is fundraising and get people to fund your candidacy. So I have a hesitancy or a built-in hesitancy because you're asking rich donors or well-off donors. Yeah, so I'm very proud of what I consider to be a pretty successful run in fundraising. And so it may be that there are some members of our alumni community who've quietly gone into the shadows when I stepped in as dean. And I don't know them because they haven't shown up. And there may be that there's some number of people who now show up who didn't show up before. Actually, I know that to be true. I have many people say to me, you know, I like that you're a dean. And I think more women come out for things than used to in the past. But it's an interesting question. I think I misinterpreted your question the first time around about the dynamic. And I was thinking very carefully about that. I don't know. I've been very successful in fundraising and I consider myself lucky. Maybe if I were a man at this time of the life of the school, I would have raised even more funds. But I don't think that's true. I think I've been able to be quite successful as a woman. Yes, I see one over there. Yes. Hi. My name's Nicole Diaz, but I identify not as he or she, but as they. And I'm currently dealing with a project right now that kind of deals with that issue. And I was wondering if Columbia has kind of run the same as the same issue. Don't look back. Yeah. Yeah, we have both in our applications. So I'll tell an interesting story. We always have 50% men and women pretty much consistently. But this year we ended up having 46% women and 50%, 46% women. And we were concerned initially that it was a problem of not being able to recruit enough women. But when we looked at the numbers more carefully, it turned out we changed our form so that we added the possibility of checking a box that did not identify gender or a box that said non-binary or something similar to that. And so we had 50% men, 46% women, and then a group of 4% who checked a non-binary box. So I think that people welcomed the opportunity to not identify as a woman or a man in the application process. But in addition, at the school, students can indicate on the forms that professors receive about the students that are going to be in their class that they'd like to be identified and what kind of pronoun they'd like to be used to identify them in class. And professors, I guess I would say there are different levels of proficiency among the professors in the law school in adapting to that dynamic. And in terms of legal writing, have any students approached the faculty with wanting to use they as singular versus plural? Because we have several students that address them. Yeah, how have you got that? Yeah, and we've been... So the legal writing instructors have adapted to that and understood the use of they as a grammatically correct usage in context where it would have otherwise been her, it could be there or his, there. So yes, we're working to try to, in a pervasive way, incorporate a capacity for students who don't want to be identified as binary as well as everybody else in the community to learn and understand a different kind of usage that's respectful of that choice. It's a slow... You know, change is hard. And you do what you can and you try to meet people where they are and then nudge them along. Well, I think people are going to get mad at me if I don't let them go out to the reception. So I just want to thank you so much, Dean Lester, for a wonderful inaugural lecture. And we look forward to it.