Transgender Lawyer’s BigLaw Experience Would Likely Be Different Today
When Jillian Weiss worked as a male lawyer at a New York law firm in the 1990s, she was ready to make the transition to a female, but she knew her employer would never stand for it.
Weiss told the New York Times that simply switching jobs along with her gender identity wouldn’t solve the bias problem. She knew her new employer would call her law firm for references and her secret would be revealed. She ended up taking a job as a legal secretary, “where her paper trail was less of an obstacle,” the newspaper says.
The experience of Weiss, now a law professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey, would likely be different today. “It is a different world,” Weiss told the Times.
She attributes the change in large part to the work of the Human Rights Campaign, which publishes an index showing how well companies treat lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees. Only 13 law firms got perfect scores on the Corporate Equality Index in 2006, the first year large law firms were invited to participate. Now the figure has grown to 64, and law firms are outpacing banking and financial services firms.
