7 January 2016, 9.30 am
I meet with a group of patent attorneyettes to talk about a Women in IP networking event later in the year. We are expecting pushback about this from the Men in IP, but we are also expecting to go ahead anyway. This is called Passive Resistance. Passive Resistance is easy, especially when people aren’t listening to you, so easy that you can get on with a patent draft and do the weekly grocery shop at the same time. Which is called Multi-Tasking. We begin with coffee and biscuits, and then we have a wonderful long discussion about how difficult it is to be a patent attorneyette in a world dominated by patent attorneys who are not -ettes, and how we can make things better for patent attorneyettes in the future, without requiring them to un-ette themselves in the process. We think it would be undignified to lower our voices and grow beards and become super-aggressively confident, and anyway we are not quite sure we are up to it. We agree that women spend too much time not being quite sure they are up to it, during which time men generally decide that they are up to it and take all the good jobs. This is why there is a gender pay gap. It is probably our own fault, and we are not sure we are up to challenging it yet. So we have another biscuit each. After an hour or so it dawns on us that perhaps we were supposed to spend this meeting coming up with some concrete plans for the networking event. But we have had a lot of fun chatting and we have put the world to rights several times over, so we figure we have certainly done no worse than the average meeting of un-etted patent attorneys – say for example a CIPA Council meeting – would have done. We will do a Strategic Plan for the event next time we meet. In fact, we might ask Mr Davies to do one for us. He is good at strategic plans, Mr Davies. Mr Mercer can add the commas.
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