NEW Dear Daughters, Dear Sisters:Strategies for Success from Multicultural Women Attorneys is a unique, inspirational collection of letters from 44 experienced women attorneys of color to the next generation outlining various roadmaps for success in the legal profession as a minority woman attorney. The book is organized by practice settings: (a) large and midsize firms; (b) solo and small firm practices; (c) public service, including government, nonprofits, executive roles in government and nonprofits, the judiciary, and elected officials; (d) in-house practices; and (e) academia. Following the essays in each chapter are tips for success from the authors featured in that chapter; these tips serve as a quick reference for you to refer to for inspiration. The essays end with a response from a sister/daughter from the next generation.  Learn more ...

View the list of dynamic women who contributed letters.  Visit the Commission on Women in the Profession for much more valuable information and listen to interviews from some of our Dear Sisters authors.

The Burdens of Both, the Privileges of Neither is a compilation of three years of research, discussion groups and regional conferences.

The Network hosted a series of roundtable discussions in Atlanta, Georgia; Washington, D.C.; Dallas, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Atlantic City, New Jersey; and Seattle, Washington. Small groups of twelve to fifteen representing a cross section of the multicultural women attorneys' community gathered to discuss the status of multicultural women attorneys in the profession. To obtain a wider sampling of opinion, the Network also held regional conferences in New York City and San Francisco. These conferences fulfilled multiple goals: fact gathering; dissemination of information; and creation of a sense of the larger policy issues flowing from individual experiences. Each conference drew 150 to 200 participants.

The Network found that multicultural women lawyers encounter persistent, pervasive and unique barriers to career opportunity, growth and advancement. The focus groups and conferences revealed:

• The combination of being an attorney of color and a woman is a double negative in the legal marketplace, regardless of the type of practice or geographic region involved;
• Multicultural women attorneys perceive they are "ghettoized" into certain practice areas and other options are closed or implicitly unavailable;
• Multicultural women attorneys must repeatedly establish their competence to professors, peers and judges;
• As evidenced by continuing attitudes and negative stereotypes, multicultural women attorneys are invisible to the profession and have more difficulty achieving prominence and rewards within the legal field;
• To succeed, multicultural women attorneys must choose between race and gender;
• Minority women lawyers face barriers of gender discrimination in minority bar associations and race discrimination in majority bar associations.

Based on its findings, the Network makes the following recommendations:

1. In full support of the ABA Goal III Report (formerly Goal IX), the Association should acknowledge and support the needs of multicultural women lawyers by providing a forum to identify and analyze issues, and present and implement solutions through the Multicultural Women Attorneys Network;
2. The ABA should actively strive to increase the involvement of women of color in the profession and the Association at all levels, by intensifying individual and collaborative efforts to ensure that multicultural women are full and equal participants;
3. The ABA should support statistical research and investigate issues.