Uniforms

The women wear the uniform of a young professional. Prep school blue blazers, neatly pressed khaki pants, white button-down shirts. They are cookie cutter copies of their male counterparts minus the balls.

My hair is short and spiky. An amethyst drop hangs between my jawline and the shoulder pads of a purple suede jacket that zips open to reveal an aubergine camisole. As I cross and re-cross my legs to show off my purple Doc Martens cowboy boots, my black miniskirt flares.

I get the side eye from the other women in this conference room: the participants, the other female partners like me who have been summoned to act as role models, the moderator in her trim pants suit. I don’t mind the looks. It means I’ve been seen and that means I’ll be remembered. And as for the designer pants suits? They’re a dime a dozen at the high-end boutiques of Amsterdam Oud Zuid.

It’s the participants who interest me. Once, they were little girls in muddy dungarees, torn t-shirts, gap-toothed grins. Or adolescents wearing too red lipstick and long loose hair. They radiate youth and possibility and far horizons until they remember where we are and why we have assembled. Their faces shutter.

This is the inaugural Female Development Program of the Dutch Bar Association. It is a nine-month long course of workshops and mentoring to teach these women how to lead so they can become partners in their respective firms.

This week’s topic is image building. I like this choice. Every partner should know about marketing, personal branding, client acquisition and retention. My notebook stands at the ready. You never know when you’ll get a useful tip.

The moderator opens the session by explaining what she means by image building. In order to become a partner, you have to look the part.

No one takes notes. Everyone in the room has already gotten the memo except for me. Only one woman dares to hold my gaze.

She’s smaller than her cohort, a tangle of dark curls and large eyes in a pale face, fragile yet feral. Even from across the room, I can tell that this one hasn’t learned yet how to hide her emotions. I can’t read her name tag and I don’t know which firm sent her but I hear her plea. She sees hope in purple cowboy boots.

I see a road leached of all color.

Now that their wardrobe choices for the day have been validated, there is a distinct whiff of smugness in the air. Something tells me the dark-haired waif is not going to make the cut.

This is the 2000s, the era of female diversity in the Netherlands. Headhunting firms like Woman Capital answer the call of corporate boards to fill their ranks with female executives. A government-funded monitor, Talent naar de Top, tracks the progress of these women on their journey through the glass ceiling. The women who run these organisations are my peers in the fight for equality.

Not everyone in The Netherlands believes this is necessary. The Dutch like to think of themselves as an egalitarian society. Formally, men and women have equal rights to education, employment, and self-actualization. Both fathers and mothers are entitled to parental leave. Yes, there is a pay gap but that is only a matter of time until the next generation comes to fill the ranks. So the experts say.

Apparently, women are not moving as quickly as the government would like. Darkly, the Dutch financial newspapers report on talk in The Hague of imposing Scandinavian-style female quota for the boards of Dutch publicly-listed companies.

The female partners at my firm, all five of us, propose hosting a client event in honor of International Women’s Day. Our idea is to invite female clients only, of which there is a surprising number. Our male partners scoff at the initiative. They do not see any profit in the venture but they indulge us this time. Ours is the first Amsterdam law firm to hold such an event.

The firm cafeteria is pimped up to look like a trendy bar. Low pink and purple lights, high shiny tables, plenty of booze. All of the firm’s female attorneys are present. At first, our guests flap about awkwardly like geese who’ve missed the call to fly south. We, the hosts, must work overtime to make everyone feel at home.

Somewhere during the evening’s walking dinner, the event ignites. Clients who are often the only female in their management team find their counterparts on other teams at other companies. Who knew there were so many of us? We share war stories, compliments, tips on good manicures.

Our first women’s networking event produces work and new clients for my firm. Our male partners are eager for us to organize another one.

C is a participant in the Female Development Program. She works in the international tax section of a large US-based law firm with a substantial satellite office in Amsterdam. Her hair is blond and her eyes are blue. She would be attractive but for the uniform she wears.

I imagine her instead in a t-shirt and torn dungarees. Her four older brothers have already reached the ridge. She has to run hard to catch them at the creek, flushed from last week’s rain. It gurgles and gushes, hungry to lick her ankles. The boys drag an old log to fashion a bridge. One by one, the boys disappear into the woods on the other bank. On this side remains the girl and the echo of her brothers’ laughter. With a war whoop worthy of any boy, she rushes across the log to show them.

The moderator turns to the topic of jewelry. Big hoop earrings are a no-no, something a college kid might wear, not a woman going up for partnership. Quietly, the participants remove their dangling earrings. I shake my head to flash my amethyst drops.

As for hair, well, short is good but neat is better, the moderator intones. Ponytails are forbidden. C tugs nervously at her inappropriately long blond mane. She stares at my wildly tufted head, daring me to look abashed.

I tell C and every other woman in the room not to worry about what others think. Make them remember you instead.

For example, M is a partner at one of the tonier firms in Amsterdam. I remember her. When she wafted into the conference room, her perfume was so heady that I thought the top floor of the Stibbe Tower would lift off. She wore a white blouse that was a froth of organza cut open to her waist. Her black pants hugged her legs as only leather can.

C objects. She feels safer in her uniform. She doesn’t have to think about what to wear every day. She knows no one will comment on how she looks and that’s exactly the way she wants it.

I understand the fear. The women in this room have already proved their competence, their ability to work hard, their drive to succeed. And yet there are so many ways in which the path of an ambitious female associate can veer into a dead end. The late nights at the office, the arguments at home, the corner in the library where the partner with the roaming hands likes to hunt.

I would like to explain to the timid participants of the Female Development Program that they have more quivers in their bow than they realize. I would like to urge them to use them all. If sexual attraction works, as it did for M, all power to you, babe.

But do I actually say that at the inaugural Female Development Program or do I wish I had?

If I had, T would have vehemently disagreed. He was my mentor when I was a baby lawyer in Washington, D.C. In those days, I wore the uniform of the place: peach colored skirt suits, prim white blouses, nude stockings that stuck to the backs of my knees in the muggy summertime. I never gave T cause to frown at my apparel. Instead, I called him the man with the alien eyes and I did so to his face. I thought this was funny.

One night, a partner from the Boston office appeared in the doorway of my cubicle on Eighteenth Street. He was one of the lobbyists who frequented the D.C. office when there were House and Senate staffers who needed to be worked. I think his area of specialty was financial regulation, the less the better as far as his clients were concerned.

I assumed he was bored and needed a break. I was a little afraid that he was looking for company. But for a lobbyist, he was alarmingly direct.

As predicted, he asked me whether I was single. As expected, he asked whether I was looking for a boyfriend. When I explained that I didn’t need any help thank you very much, he told me about a Congressional staffer he had been lobbying. Apparently, this staffer was new to town and lonely. Would I be interested in dating him?

I told T about this incident the next morning over coffee at his secretary’s station. For a man with alien eyes, he turned more shades of red than I knew possible. He promised to stop that partner from trying to pimp me. He offered protection if I wanted it. He seemed to imply that, if I wanted to sue the firm, he would understand.

I didn’t understand. I thought it was a joke, like calling the partner who wielded all power over my future at the firm a man with alien eyes.

T thought I could be a star. He warned me not to rely only on my people skills. At the end of the day, a client pays for content. He thought that all lawyers, male and female, should disappear into the wallpaper until their advice is needed. T said, don’t draw attention to yourself.

F is an associate in my corporate law group. She’s not senior enough yet to participate in the Female Development Program but I think she’s a high potential, which is another way of saying I like her.

When I first came to this firm, I was a lateral hire while F had joined straight from law school. She knew everyone: their quirks, who they’d slept with, what they did when they got angry. F could see the good in each one of us, a skill whose rarity I could not yet appreciate. She made sure that I was accepted and I thought to return that favor by helping her make partner.

So we would stand together before the ceiling high window in our shared office on the Keizersgracht to admire the canals of Amsterdam and beyond that the nineteenth century towers of the Rijksmuseum. In the summer, we listened to small watercraft plying the canals. In winter, an organ might appear on the ice to entertain skaters. Finally, F agreed to confide in me.

She told me she hadn’t decided yet whether she wants to become a partner. She wanted to be a mother first.

When F returned from maternity leave after the birth of her first child, I heard the call her grandmother placed every day to ask F, are you sure you should be working?

Every working woman in the Netherlands knows about the playground mafia — the mothers who judge other mothers for trying to combine work and family. Not so long ago, stay-at-home moms were the norm here. My mother-in-law’s generation quit work altogether once they married. Nowadays, most Dutch women reduce their working hours as soon as they have children while, at the same time, assuming disproportionate responsibility for unpaid childcare. I once lost a Dutch friend because he thought no woman could be both a mother and a successful professional.

For a while, F wore the uniform of young mothers: loud, stretchy print dresses that forgive unwanted rolls of flab. The moderators at the Female Development Program would not approve but I didn’t care about that. I wanted to toughen F’s soul.

I told her that making partner is not very different from coming out of a negotiation with a good deal. It’s not about whether anyone likes you.

One day, F came to my new partner office. She sat across from me and propped her elbows on my desk, Her hands leaned against each other, right slightly lower than left. They looked like trees in a glade where the younger tree uses the older one for support. She said, you push down so hard on me that I can never grow straight.

I have worn uniforms all my life. In fourth grade, my Catholic school uniform consisted of a navy blue and green plaid skirt with a matching tie over a white sailor blouse. As soon as I came home, I tore it off for shorts and a faded tank top. Then my brothers and me would head to the ridge across the street from our house.

Our ridge had no creek. It was covered in cactus and airborne trash and cardboard boxes my brothers and I would use to slide down the smooth back of the ridge. I didn’t care then about clothing or how people thought I should look. I was happy as I was, muddy and scabbed and free.

Something changed all that and I can’t really say if it was T and his well-meant advice or high potentials like F and C or the dark-haired waif who wanted help I could not give. Not anymore.

For long before I became a lawyer and every day since then, I wear a uniform you can’t buy in any store. Sexier than any organza and leather concoction M could contrive. More powerful than the strictest version the Female Development Program could impose on its participants. My uniform is as flexible as the fins of a fish. It is waterproof, shockproof, impermeable to all forms of emotion. I have worn it for so long it has melted into my skin. It is near impossible to remove.

My uniform protects me from wanting to be liked by my partners or my associates, by my clients or opposing counsel, by any of the women sitting in the conference room at the inaugural Female Development Program. My uniform makes me strong.

Despite our support for the Female Development Program, my firm continues to lose female associates. These women are experienced attorneys in whom time and money have been invested. They have clients who may not stay with the firm. They possess knowledge as yet unshared. At the moment they are most valuable to the firm, they run.

My partners decide that we need to staunch the flow and that I am the woman to do so. They give me no guidelines or metrics or budget. Fix the problem, they say.

I am a new partner so I can’t say no but I’m also not stupid. I’ve been at the firm long enough to know that the problem is not with the women we lose but the men who already sit in the partnership.

The worst of these dinosaurs is E. He wears the uniform of a senior partner, rumpled and ill-fitting and stinking of tobacco. His face is as gray as the ash that shatters at the end of his lit cigarette. Our shared addiction is our sole bond. We both insist on smoking in the office even though it has been banned for mere mortals.

We sit in his office on opposite sides of a desk piled with paper. E doesn’t know how to type. He uses a dictaphone to draft court pleadings.

We light our cigarettes and talk of this and that. Eventually, we get around to this female development thing I’m supposed to do. I ask him, will you help me?

I am flabbergasted when E agrees, secretly pleased, more than a little miffed because now I realize I could have asked for more. My suspicions aroused, I want to know why he’s become so accomodating.

Women are handicapped, E says.

Apparently, our handicap stems from the fact that we can get pregnant and men cannot. We females need the help of males since we can’t help ourselves.

The Female Development Program no longer exists. It’s now called the Women Leadership Programme, which is part of the continuing education curriculum of the Dutch Bar Association. Two of my partners teach at the Women Leadership Programme but I do not. I left my firm and the law altogether over a decade ago.

I don’t know whether C ever made partner but F did. E died a few years ago and I think T did, too. I have a terrible feeling that the dress code is still intact at the newly branded Women Leadership Programme.

Over the past twelve years, I’ve done my best to shed my uniforms. First the provocative clothing, then the statement shoes, and finally all the make-up. What’s left is the uniform still baked into my skin. When I try to scrape that off, deep scars open.

I suspect there will always be a part of me that longs to project strength. I suspect that I will always be afraid to reveal myself as I am rather than how I would like others to perceive me.

I think often of C and how all she wanted by wearing her uniform was to avoid getting hurt. That was probably what T was trying to do: keep me out of the line of fire. Maybe it was a good thing that E and I never did succeed in promoting more women into the partnership. It’s a wonder that F made partner despite the two of us. I wasn’t teaching her how to thrive. I was showing her how to tread water.

As for me, I keep chipping away at my uniform, scale by scale. Sometimes, I draw blood but this is a price I’m willing to pay. Someday, I hope to remove my uniform entirely. Then a girl in muddy dungarees and a gap-toothed grin can finally emerge.

Be kind to her. All she wants is to be liked.

With this essay from her unpublished work we want to honor the memory of Karen Kao.