Burned Out BigLaw Lawyer Says ‘Woman’s Card’ Only Held Her Back
Kristen Jarvis Johnson, 33, says she “encountered blatant gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and a very clear glass ceiling” as she climbed the ladder as a $400,000 a year senior associate at Squire Patton Boggs, in its Qatar office.
As a story in The Washington Post put it, “she had enough of being one of the few women in the upper ranks of her white-shoe law firm. She’d had enough of hitting or exceeding all her targets and being told she didn’t need a bonus. She’d had enough of being told she had to work harder after advising on a case in between contractions as she was in labor.”
So she left the firm.
A Squire Patton spokesman said that 13 of the 29 lawyers promoted to partner globally this year were women, and during the period when Johnson was in Doha, the firm had four partners in the office, two of whom were women.
