I studied law as a single mother. In my final year, my two children were both under the age of six. I don’t know how I survived it.
I had a modest scholarship I’d worked hard for. It meant I could study full-time without also taking paid work. I’m not sure how I would have managed without it.
What it did not give me, however, was time. Between studying and looking after two small children, there simply wasn’t any left. There were few parents in my cohort and, as far as I knew, none doing it alone.
Finishing law school doesn’t make you a lawyer. There’s a further practical qualification, and paid pathways are few and fiercely contested. My scholarship had carried me through my degree, but it would not carry me through what came next.
Towards the end of my degree, I applied for one of a handful of paid positions that would allow me to complete that training. More than 600 people applied for four positions, and I made the final five. I didn’t get the job.
Devastated, I asked for feedback. During the interview, I had been asked what I did outside law school. I took the question to mean the usual ornaments of an ambitious student’s CV: volunteering, law review, committees, competitions. I struggled to answer. I had barely managed the degree itself, let alone anything beyond it.
The feedback was that they wanted to know more about me, outside my studies. They wanted to know about my hobbies. Had I been less gutted, I might have laughed. That was 10 years ago, and it still stings.
I do not think the question was designed to exclude me. It is an ordinary interview question, intended to reveal something about character, initiative and breadth. But it can also measure something else: spare time. And spare time is not evenly distributed.
Someone with discretionary hours can volunteer, join committees, edit journals, attend events and cultivate interests. They can accumulate the things we later read as evidence that they are engaged, interesting and ambitious. Someone without those hours cannot. From the other side of the interview table, we cannot necessarily tell the difference between someone who lacked initiative and someone who simply did not have another hour to give.
Things turned out well for me. I became a lawyer and, eventually, a barrister. But I sometimes wonder how different the trajectory might have been had I had the capacity to make myself more visible at the beginning. The irony is that visibility matters even more to me now than it did back then.
At the Bar, I am my business. There is no employer to advance my name. Work comes because solicitors know me, trust me and think of me when the right matter lands on their desk. Talent and skill are essential, but being good at your job and being known to be good at your job are different things. Bridging that distance is its own body of work.
It means writing articles, speaking at conferences, attending events, maintaining professional relationships and contributing publicly. It means making sure the people who might brief, hire or recommend you know what you can do. None of that appears in a job description, but all of it takes time.
For someone with discretionary evenings, visibility can compound beautifully: an event leads to a relationship, the relationship to an opportunity, and the opportunity to greater visibility. For someone whose evening begins with school pickup and ends after dinner, homework, baths and bedtime, that same investment requires finding an hour that may not exist.
My circumstances are different now. I have a wonderfully supportive partner who is my number one cheer squad. But I am still ‘Mum’. I have forgone opportunities, not because I failed to see them, but because I chose my children instead. I am comfortable with those choices. I would rather miss an opportunity because I decided it was not worth the cost than because an invisible expectation excluded me from it.
I could, perhaps, have done more extracurricular activities at law school. I also might have broken myself trying. Working yourself to the bone is not a compelling career strategy, and it would not have made me a better mother or lawyer.
What has changed is that I have stopped wishing visibility did not matter, and I’ve become more deliberate about pursuing it. I write because it raises my professional profile, certainly, but also because I genuinely love it. It gives me a creative outlet that is often absent in legal practice.
I loathe generic networking events, but love genuine connection. So I choose events where those connections are likely to happen and skip the rest. I try to make the scarce hours I spend on my career outside the work itself return twice: professionally and personally. An activity should advance my career, but also nourish the soul. That has become my version of balance.
I am not suggesting women should reject self-promotion, visibility or ambition. Quite the opposite. I regard writing, speaking and public contribution as important parts of professional life. This article is, after all, an example of exactly that.
But we should be candid about what “put yourself out there” actually asks of people. Visibility has a cost. Its currency is time. And those with the least discretionary time are often carrying the greatest share of unpaid work. When we select, promote and assess potential, we should ask whether we are measuring capability or capacity.
A decade later, I still cannot tell you what my hobby was when I was asked that question. I had two little children and a law degree to finish. There were no hours left. Perhaps, when we assess what someone has done with their opportunities, we should pay more attention to how many hours they had in the first place.