‘It is an oddly disorienting time to be a woman trying to wield her own power in this world’

My thanks to the Toronto Lawyers Association for recognizing me with this incredible honour.

I learned in early October that the Toronto Lawyers Association would be presenting me with this award tonight. Yet somehow it was only this morning that I put pen to paper and tried to make sense of all the thoughts that have been rattling around my head since that time.

While I am a lifelong and highly accomplished procrastinator, it was something more than mere avoidance that was inhibiting my efforts to write this particular speech. Simply put, I could not figure out what to say. This event is a celebration, and these award recognize work that should give us, as lawyers, pride in the profession and hope for the future.

But there is something fundamentally unsettling in the zeitgeist right now, that makes it a challenging time to be a woman in public life, never mind an outspoken feminist working at the boundaries of the law.

As many of know, when I got that call from TLA president Marg Waddell last October, I was at a turning point in my career. I had just decided to leave my second firm in as many years and follow in her footsteps, by founding my own firm. My reasons for doing so were both deeply personal and garden variety: I felt undervalued and under-supported by my partners.  More importantly, I lacked the power and autonomy to build the career I wanted, or to do the work I believe needs doing.

So it was time to strike out on my own – to be my own boss, and to stop giving away my power to others without getting enough in return.

Fundamentally, the law is about power – who has it, who gets it, and how they are allowed to wield it. If you want to drive social change, you’re probably going to need to push or change the law. And if you want to change the law, you are going to need power to make it happen.

It is an oddly disorienting time to be a woman trying to wield her own power in this world. On the one hand, feminism – or “feminism” – has become wildly fashionable. Public figures are enthusiastically embracing the term. You can buy a thousand different “Smash the Patriarch” T-shirts from Amazon. Every firm has a Diversity and Inclusion Committee – even the ones without any real female partners. Every other day, someone is claiming that someone new has smashed the glass ceiling.

Yet evidence of misogyny remains all around us.  Lest anyone forget, there is a self-confessed sexual predator in the White House. Just this morning, Elizabeth Warren – possibly the most perfect combination of brains, compassion and persistence ever to manifest in human form – dropped out of the US Presidential race. It is thus guaranteed that the next president will be another old white guy with a questionable track record on issues of gender and sexual misconduct. The glass ceiling is still very much intact.

In Canada, we’re not faring a whole lot better these days. All of our political leaders are men. The gender pay gap is still $0.21 for every dollar. Women’s health and safety remain low priorities – just yesterday, Ontario cut a million dollars in funding to the province’s front-line sexual assault crisis centres. Reproductive rights are constantly under attack. And before we get too uppity about the political mess south of the border, let me remind you that we have never elected a woman to run this country either.

In the legal profession, study after study demonstrates that law firms are still expecting women to outwork and outperform their male colleagues in order to advance. The recent trend of encouraging women to ‘Lean In’ to their careers just reinforces this idea – as though it is somehow our failure to work hard enough, rather than the patriarchal structure of traditional law firms, that is holding us back. It’s of little surprise that, by simply adding committees and tinkering with existing power structures, we not making much headway in the fight for gender parity in the profession.

I confess that there are days where I am so consumed by a mixture of rage, frustration and despair at all of this that I lose sight of the big picture. So let me remind you – and myself – that incremental change happens incrementally. It can often only be seen in hindsight. But it is almost always made by those who refuse to tacitly support the status quo and dedicate themselves to altering systems of power.

I began advocating for victims of sexual violence during my articles in 2002. At that time, civil claims for sexual assault were governed by a strict two-year limitation period. This meant that a large part of every lawsuit was spent fighting over the question of whether the victim could sue at all. When claims did proceed, you did well if you could secure a low six figures for your client – less, probably, than you would get if you slipped and fell and broke your arm.

In the interceding 18 years, the law in this area has evolved exponentially. Limitation periods were relaxed in 2005, and then eliminated completely in 2015.  Victims no longer face the blame-laden question: why did you wait so long? Just as importantly, damage awards now regularly exceed seven figures.

The law in this area did not evolve accidentally, but as the result to the smart, tenacious advocacy of lawyers who dedicated themselves to the cause advocating for the disempowered and educating the courts on the true, equality-impairing damage wrought by sexual violence.

If the MeToo movement has shown us anything, these issues are far from solved; this work is far from done. I will continue to do what I can to contribute to the evolution of the law, as a means of empowering the women who need its protection, and to the advancement of gender issues within the profession, as a means of redistributing power to achieve true equality.