This makes me so angry. Every story like this make me angry. My non law followers have to understand: an associate to a high court justice is one of *the* most prized graduate positions on finishing law school, if not the most. (THREAD) https://twitter.com/katgallow/status/1274962962759864321

Around Australia, law students from every school apply. Because it’s such a prized position, students who are offered these positions usually have a bunch of offers to pick from (because they’re the best). And because it’s prestigious, other offers will typically work around it.

So we’re talking best of the best students, who when they finish the associateship will go on to join a top corporate law firm (“magic circle” or “top tier” firms), or the state solicitor’s office, or a fed gov graduate job.

These women were among best law students in the country. Future barristers, partners, chief justices! To read about how for more than one of them, this killed their hopes of continuing in the profession, is devastating.

It’s also so bloody unsurprising by now I’ve just turned my anger to all of us complicit in it. Even I heard the rumours about Heydon and I was like six steps removed from a top law student. It just didn’t affect me (when was I ever going to be confronted with it?).

Every time someone talks about a “pipeline problem” or “lifestyle problem” preventing more of someone in something, while playing blind to the role their own culture plays in women, people of colour, people who are different, being bullied and harassed, call themout.

We know Heydon wasn’t an outlier. This pattern reproduces itself across every industry. It is a pattern tied to toxic ideas of power, entitlement and “belonging”. Every work place you’ve ever been part of, I can nearly guarantee at some point this pattern has manifested.

And look, it’s really really hard to dig it out, and expose it. I am learning, to my great shame, the ways I have been complicit in bullying behaviour simply because I let it go, on the grounds it didn’t affect me. I am trying to be better and bolder calling it out.

And it is still true that calling it out typically costs a great deal, more sometimes than being called out costs a harasser, who is already in a position of power, which is what makes their behaviour possible and devastating.

But if you can’t or won’t, at the very least, acknowledge that in all likelihood the position you’re in, if you find yourself working up the ranks, accumulating power, is not all about “merit”. That for every person given a hand up, someone else is likely punched down.

And that, if you really want to build diverse workplaces, it isn’t just about bringing in other kinds of people, but changing the attitudes and behaviours of the people already working in it. That is hard. That is actually the harder thing. It’s why we often don’t do that thing.

In this particular case, law remains male dominated (and white) at the highest positions of power. It’s not women being women, it’s not women having kids, it’s not women not being able to “cut it”; it is also, women being groped and forcibly kissed and manipulated and bullied.

In their first real job, fresh out of school, hopeful and dreamy, all HDs and an A+ CV. And all of you people who knew this was happening, and *were* in positions to intervene, over years, and yet didn’t, should feel deep, enduring shame, over your complicity.

Not only for your complicity in the harassment itself, but in the role your failure to use your power, when it counted, played in curtailing these blooming, brilliant careers.

This is so old, this pattern. It’s everywhere. And it won’t die unless we all do better.