Sometime in the mid-1990s I was in a deposition and looked around the room and suddenly noticed that everyone there, the court reporter, the witnesses and the attorneys, were all women. This would have been unheard of even five years before, when I was so accustomed to being the only woman in the room, that the moment stuck with me ever since.

In 1982, I passed the bar at a time when California was a solidly red state on the verge of electing 16 straight years of Republican governors in George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. This meant that the men-first culture is something I saw practically at its height. While the last year or so has been tremendous for women in our country and in our state, it was a far different story when I was first cutting my teeth as a woman in the legal profession, even in such a progressive city as San Francisco.