Not Just Passion Projects: Reframing Women’s Specialized Legal Work

Female lawyers who move into niche areas of practice still face familiar gendered assumptions, even when those specialties demand unusual technical skill, courtroom confidence and entrepreneurial drive. In specialized and typically misunderstood fields such as white-collar crime, animal law, environmental litigation, privacy law, Indigenous rights, technology regulation, prison law, immigration appeals and workplace investigations, women often find that colleagues and peers read their career choices through a gendered lens before they assess the quality of their work.

This matters because assumptions inside the profession affect who is seen as credible, who gets the most challenging files and who is treated as a serious long-term builder of a practice. Women remain underrepresented in Canadian private practice and in senior roles, and these judgments can narrow opportunities in subtle ways, especially in specialty areas that do not fit older ideas about what successful lawyers are supposed to look like.

In white-collar crime, the stereotype is often about toughness. Colleagues may still picture the ideal legal counsel as a seasoned male litigator who is “naturally suited” to representing executives, handling fraud allegations or negotiating with regulators and Crown counsel. Women who enter the field can be treated as surprising choices for serious financial crime files, as though courtroom authority and strategic detachment are masculine traits rather than professional skills.

And these assumptions can shape work allocation. Senior lawyers may be more inclined to hand women research tasks, witness preparation or narrower procedural issues while steering lead advocacy on complex fraud, corruption or regulatory prosecutions to their male peers, who they deem a safer fit for demanding clients. This bias is rarely stated openly, although it can affect who develops a trial record, who builds client relationships and who accumulates the kind of experience that leads to recognition in a narrow practice.

Women in criminal and quasi-criminal practice have also reported being mistaken for assistants, students or junior support staff rather than counsel, especially in courthouse settings. A Criminal Lawyers’ Association study reported that senior male lawyers often saw women as students or assistants rather than fully qualified professionals, and many women claim they have been treated differently than male peers by judges, court staff, police and Crown attorneys. These experiences are not identical to white-collar practice, but they help explain why women entering a specialized advocacy field may feel pressure to prove basic authority before they can demonstrate advanced expertise.

Animal law produces a different, but equally limiting, set of assumptions. The field has in fact been shaped largely by women pioneers, including Victoria Shroff, KC, who is widely described as one of Canada’s first and longest-serving animal law lawyers and the longest-serving in B.C., and Rebeka Breder, whose Vancouver practice follows in this vein as an exclusive animal law firm. Yet women in this area still encounter the view that they are driven more by emotion than by astute legal analysis, and that their work is a passion project rather than a rigorous and challenging specialty. This assumption ignores the range and complexity of the field. Animal law can involve constitutional arguments, judicial review, administrative law, civil liability, municipal bylaws, wildlife regulation, agricultural oversight, veterinary negligence and disputes over dangerous dog designations or pet custody. Treating the practice as soft or sentimental diminishes the expertise required to build precedent and advise clients in a developing area of law.

The same pattern appears in other specialties when female lawyers choose them. A lawyer who focuses on workplace investigations may be assumed to be especially empathetic but not necessarily strategic. A practitioner in privacy, children and youth law, human rights, elder law or immigration may be seen as mission-driven first and technically skilled second. A lawyer in environmental or Indigenous rights litigation may be framed as an advocate with values rather than as counsel with sophisticated command of public law, evidence and procedure.

These are not neutral descriptions; they are gendered, and they influence how peers rank prestige inside the profession. Practice areas linked to major corporate clients and large revenue streams are often treated as more serious, while specialties associated with care, social impact or emerging legal questions are more likely to be described as niche in a dismissive sense. When women predominate in or visibly shape those areas, the risk is that the work itself is undervalued along with the lawyers doing it.

Assumptions about motivation are another recurring problem. Men who enter unusual specialties are often described as entrepreneurial, innovative or strategically ahead of the market. Women making similar choices may be asked whether they were drawn there because the work is more flexible, more compatible with family life or closer to personal interests. In white-collar crime, that can minimize the ambition required to develop a high-stakes advocacy practice. In animal law, it can reduce a deliberate legal career to a question of affection for animals.

Organizations have acknowledged that bias and assumptions continue to shape women lawyers’ careers. The Law Society of B.C. has reported that women make up only about 34 per cent of practising lawyers in the province, and commentary tied to that work has noted subtle but real assumptions about women and leadership, commitment and competence. Each provincial branch of the Canadian Bar Association maintains a Women Lawyers Forum aimed at promoting systems and programs that support women in the profession, which is also a clear sign that the issue remains structural rather than merely anecdotal.

The challenge for the profession is not only to welcome women into niche practices, but to stop filtering their choices through outdated expectations. That means recognizing specialty areas as demanding fields in which authority should be measured by skill and judgment, not by gendered ideas about toughness, compassion or fit. Until those assumptions lose their hold, female lawyers will keep doing two jobs at once: building specialized practices and proving, over and over again, that the practices are credible and they belong there.