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NEWSLETTER
- President's Message from 2009 Board President Naomi Dewey >>
Happy Birthday! This year, we celebrate Santa Barbara Women Lawyer’s Twenty-First Anniversary. SBWL was founded in 1988 by a group of dedicated women including the County’s first female judicial officer, Commissioner Deborah Talmage, and Hannah Beth Jackson, who went on to represent our district in the State Assembly. The nine women who saw the need for this organization and made it happen were, it turned out, the tip of the iceberg – the first meeting was standing room only.
Twenty one years after that first meeting, I am surprised at how often I am asked whether SBWL is still relevant in the 21st Century. I’m going to let the National Association of Women Lawyers answer that: their most recent survey showed that “in spite of more than two decades in which women have graduated from law schools and started careers in private practice at about the same rate as men… women lawyers account for fewer than 16% of equity partners…the average firm’s highest governing committee counts women as only 15% of its members – and 15% of the nation’s largest firms have no women at all on their governing committees. Only about 6% of law firm managing partners are women.” (NAWL Report of the Third Annual National Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms, November 2008.)
Is Santa Barbara bucking the national trend? We’re about to find out. Over the coming weeks, check your email for a link to our county-wide salary and employment survey. This repeat of our 1998 survey looks not only at dollars and cents, but also flexible work schedules, benefits, vacation time and much more.
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