Episode 17 - Afra Afsharipour

Afra Afsharipour joins JSL's Vickie Hubbard for Episode 17 of Not Your Average DEI Podcast! Afra and Vickie discuss Afra's journey from law school to practicing at a Big Law firm to being a Professor of Law at UC Davis, the experience of women in law today, and her vision for tomorrow.

Afra Afsharipour is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis School of Law. She served as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2018-2024. She holds a B.A. (magna cum laude) from Cornell University and a J.D. from Columbia Law School (Harlan Fisk Stone Scholar), where she was an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review and a submissions editor of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law.  Prior to joining the Davis faculty, Professor Afsharipour was an attorney at the international law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP where she advised clients on domestic and cross border mergers and acquisitions, public and private securities offerings, and corporate governance and compliance matters. She served as a law clerk for Judge Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Professor Afsharipour’s scholarship focuses on corporate governance and business law in a transnational and comparative context. Her scholarship also applies an equality lens to corporate governance and practice, using interdisciplinary theories and empirical research. She has taught Business Associations, Mergers and Acquisitions, Startups and Venture Capital, Corporate Governance and Antitrust. Professor Afsharipour is a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute, an elected member of the American Law Institute and an American Bar Foundation Fellow. Her scholarship has been published in leading law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Chicago Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and other leading journals and books. She is the co-editor of Comparative Corporate Governance (Afra Afsharipour & Martin Gelter, eds., Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2021). She authored the Handbook on Corporate Governance in India: Legal Standards and Board Practices (The Conference Board 2016) and co-authored the 2021 edition of the book. Professor Afsharipour has delivered numerous talks, nationally and internationally, and has been a visiting scholar in India, China, and Taiwan. 

Transcript

Vickie: [00:00:00] Welcome to JURISolutions Legal’s Not Your Average DEI Podcast. We want to inform our listeners that this podcast episode was recorded prior to the 2024 presidential election. Therefore, the opinion shared by our guests represent their perspective at that time. We encourage you to keep this context in mind as you listen.

Hello everyone. Welcome to Not Your Average DEI Podcast, brought to you by JURISAdvance the consulting service line of JURISolutions Legal, also referred to as JSL. JURISAdvance focuses on the retention and utilization of highly qualified legal professionals and law firms from a wide range of backgrounds.

In each episode of our podcast, we invite a key thought leader to join us as we share, learn, and grow as one legal community. I'm Vicki Hubbard, a member of JSL'S Inclusive Engagement Committee, and I am [00:01:00] excited to welcome Afra Afsharipour as today's guest, as she is highly accomplished as an attorney professor of law and author

During today’s fireside chat, we'll learn about Afra's journey from law school to practicing law at a big law firm to being a professor of law at UC Davis. Afra will share what prompted her transition, her journey along the way as a woman of color, her thoughts on the state of women and law today, and her vision for tomorrow.

First, a little about our special guest. Afra Afsharipour is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California Davis School of Law, previously served as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Afra is a first generation immigrant and identifies as Persian. She holds a BA from Cornell University and a JD from Columbia Law School.

Prior to joining the Davis faculty, professor Afsharipour was an [00:02:00] attorney at the International law firm Davis Pope in Wardwell, LLP. Professor Afsharipour’s scholarship focuses on corporate governance and business law in a transnational and comparative context. She also applies an equality lens to corporate governance and practice using interdisciplinary theories and empirical research.

She has authored and co-edited several books on corporate governance. Her scholarship has been published in leading law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Chicago Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and other leading journals and books. Let's all welcome Afra to the show. Hi Afra.

Afra: Thank you so much for having me here with you.

Vickie: I'm so excited to have you on the show. Listeners, this is going to be a treat today. We’d love to hear your perspective today, Afra, as it relates to what can we do to bridge that gap between diversity and the law. So we're going to [00:03:00] peel back the layers today everyone.

I'd like for you to get to know Afra personally before we jump into meat of the reason why we're today. You're a first generation immigrant and you identify as Persian, so would you mind sharing a little bit about your heritage, anything that you want our listeners to know about your background as a woman of color?

Afra: Sure. So, I moved to the United States at the end of elementary school, was born in Iran. I had spent my early age there. I went all the way through fourth grade there, and some of that time was, a fair bit of my schooling was actually there, post-revolution, and so I experienced that chaos of a revolution in regime change as a child and then moved to the United States as an immigrant. I didn't speak any English when I moved, so I knew maybe three words like yes, no, and thank you. I guess thank you is technically two words. I took some time [00:04:00] to adjust to a new country, a new culture, but I was lucky enough through education and some great teachers when I was in high school to really open my mind up to, What do I wanna do? What kind of impact I want to make?

And I was really very lucky enough to get a pretty generous scholarship to go to Cornell for my undergraduate journey. And my parents at the time, I went to high school in Northern California, and so they let me go all the way across the country to Cornell, which I think was like a daunting and scary task for them, especially as people who had never lived in New York, who didn't have any family members there, but was very, very new to them. But they had a real faith in my ability to navigate this new educational experience, and I had a phenomenal experience as an undergraduate there. I was very supported both by, I think the faculty that I came across at the university, but then also just the richness and diversity of a place like Cornell, [00:05:00] which was very different for me from actually my experience in my high school, which was not particularly diverse.

And so that was I think a really transformative experience for me. 

Vickie: Love that. And I'd love to hear more about that diverse representation as it relates to your transition from Cornell University in comparison to when you transitioned to law school, what that looked like as it related to diverse representation.

Afra: I think, you know, by the time I went to law school, I started law school in 1996, and I think by the time I went to law school actually, almost half of all law students were women. And so in terms of issues of gender diversity, I think you could really see that law schools were transforming quite a bit.

Columbia had worked on enhancing racial and ethnic diversity at the law school, but I think it was really very much still a work in progress, and I certainly experienced that amongst the student body, and I would say both when it came to [00:06:00] faculty and kind of senior faculty in the dean's office and some of those other people with institutional power at the university, it wasn't diverse the way that I think law schools have changed, particularly over the past 10 years to be more. And so that was very isolating in the sense that it was very hard to find effective mentors at the law school kind of generally, at least across the faculty. I certainly found some, not necessarily ones that had had life experiences that were similar to mine, but at the same time, the mentors I did find were very supportive of me and my career.

But almost all of my mentors when I was in law school were white men because that was really a large part of the makeup of our faculty actually at Columbia at the time, and even in areas that I was particularly interested in and just more international law and human rights types of courses, other than one faculty member who was a white woman. Everybody else who taught in that field at the time when I was there was a white male, and they were [00:07:00] very supportive of me and my career and what I wanted to do, and selected me for research assistant positions and things that were really helpful as I developed my legal skills. But their life experiences were very different from mine.

Vickie: I think it's important for our listeners who may not be aware what that particular demographic looks like as it relates to law school and then transitioning from law school to practicing law within a law firm. And you know, we'll talk a little more later in our conversation around the importance of mentorship, the importance of sponsorship, and any mentors that you may have had while you were practicing law, in comparison to you being an academic now, and any mentoring that you may have experienced when you made that transition to UC Davis, I like that you identified that when you were in law school that there was a bit of a disparity, there was a gap there as it relates to gender presence, as it relates [00:08:00] to women that would be open to taking you under their wing and mentoring you.

And do you think that has changed fast forward 10, 15 years? Like what do you think that looks like today in in law schools across America?

Afra: I think it's changed somewhat, but I think there's still quite a bit of work to be done. And I think it depends on, frankly, the law school and where it's positioned and how much of a true institutional commitment it has had to both gender and racial diversity.

So I have been really privileged to teach at UC, Davis School of Law since the beginning of my academic career, and really privileged to be at a law school where there was significant institutional commitment to diversifying the faculty. And a lot of that work really goes to our former dean, Kevin Johnson, who recently just stepped down and had previously been the associate Dean, which was the role that I had taken on, and together with our [00:09:00] prior dean before Kevin, Rex Perschbacher, they had worked incredibly hard to change the makeup of the faculty at UC Davis.

And so for me, when I joined the faculty at Davis, it was really the first time where almost every single mentor I had and every faculty member that was my mentor was a person of color or a woman. It was kind of shocking, and actually at first it was so surprising to me because it just was such a different experience. But it was so incredibly important to see the sort of the, how much they could connect with both my life experience, but also just how incredibly diverse they were in their own life experiences and in what they could bring to sort of the mentorship relationship that we had.

But UC Davis is not representative of what all law schools in the United States look like. And certainly in a field like mine, which is corporate and [00:10:00] business law. Outside of a place like UC Davis, it is a field that is undergoing a transition where when I first joined the academy, many of the senior scholars, and most well-respected scholars in the field were men. Almost all of them were white men. And that has changed over the last 16, 17 years since I have been a law professor, where now we're really seeing a rise in the prominence of women and people of color and some women of color. But there's still a lot of work to be done in my field, specifically as there are in others.

Vickie: Thank you for sharing that. I want us to talk about, because we jumped into some really good stuff, but I really want everyone that's listening to have an understanding of your journey into law and what inspired you to pursue a legal career. And I know that you transitioned to America at an early age.

What inspired you to want to take [00:11:00] this career journey?

Afra: I do not come from a family of lawyers, my generation of cousins and so forth. But really the first generation of women in my family that were educated, my paternal grandmother couldn't read or write. It did not come from a family of highly educated women prior to sort of really my generation of family members.

So for me, you know, I think the transition to law really came out of this sense of social justice that I was exposed to, both from having been persecuted by the Iranian regime as a child, and then having to leave our country and then having to struggle with immigration and our immigration status. And so I was very clear on sort of the power that the law had over people's abilities to reach their life goals.

And that really impacted my life daily in many ways when I was in middle [00:12:00] school and high school and had to feel come to the United States. And so, I can't remember a time where I didn't want to be a lawyer. A friend of mine recently found a, a letter a few years ago that was from me to her when I was 13 and I said, I'm going to go to law school. I'm going to go to Columbia Law School. You know, I was very driven to want to do that. So it was really going to be important to me. I think from the time I started college, I knew I was going to go to law school. I didn't actually really know any lawyers. I didn't have family members who were lawyers. And I had a sense of what lawyers did, and I read a lot of books, you know, as I was trying to learn English my way really into this country and this culture and this language, which was the new language for me, was really through books. And so I read a fair number of books that were law related. 

Vickie: Love it. And so to hear you share that, you know, you knew your calling very early. There's so much strength and understanding where you see yourself in the future. And as we're able to understand that at an early age, we're able to pick up [00:13:00] mentors along the way that can help guide and direct our path. And so I think it's wonderful that even without having that support at an early age, you were still able to navigate and look at where you are today. Okay, so let's talk about your transition. And so you practiced law at a law firm before you became a professor of law. You were the dean of affairs and then now professor of law at UC Davis. And so, I want us to talk about that transition. Can you share with us a little bit about your journey, post law school initially being a practicing attorney at a big law firm? And then what led to your transition to now being an academic at UC Davis School of Law.

Afra: Now, I had had in my head that being a professor from the time that I was really an undergrad and I did a senior honors thesis and I wrote, you know, a really, really long think thesis was like 150 pages long that I was [00:14:00] very interested in being an academic.

But I also put myself through law school and had taken on, even though I had generous scholarships above undergrad and law school, I'd taken on a lot of debt between two sort of private Ivy League schools. And so the thought of being an academic just didn't seem like a reality for me at the time when I was in law school because I just, I needed to pay back all my debt and so I went to a law firm, Davis Polk and Wardwell, and I started out in the New York office kind of doing a variety of things. They had a rotation system at the time, so I, you could really explore kind of what area of law you were very interested in. I had been a summer associate there the summer after my second year of law school.

I worked there a little bit my third year of law school, helping some of the partners on research work that they were doing, and then joined after I was a clerk on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for a year. And so going through these rotations, they were all in different areas of corporate practice.

I found that I was [00:15:00] particularly interested in corporate practice. I had figured that out when I was a summer associate after my summer of second year that I liked arguing and I loved writing, but I didn't want to be a litigator at a law firm that I actually wanted to think about, you know, projects where the lawyers were part of building something.

And I think that is something that's very appealing about corporate law and corporate practice specifically. And so I went to the firm in some ways with the intention of going there for a couple of years and paying off my debt and then going and doing human rights related work, which was really what I was interested in when I was in law school and why one of the reasons I had gone to Columbia was because they had a human rights fellowship, which I actually did take advantage job when I was in law school, and I fell in love with corporate law, which I was very shocked by.

I think it was intellectually incredibly stimulating. The work was very fast paced. Sometimes you'd work on a transaction, it would be on the cover of the newspapers, and that was [00:16:00] pretty exciting. The people that I worked with were incredibly thoughtful, you know, very smart, really dedicated lawyers, say very ethical lawyers, and for the most part, you know, a lot of the people that I worked with at the firm were very interested in kind of mentoring me and taking me under their wing, even though I would say pretty much all of them were white men, but they did see some kind of a potential, or at least believed in my ability to work really hard because I'm such a workhorse. And I was there for a few years in New York and then for personal reasons, moved to the California office in Menlo Park and then practiced for another about five years in park.

So I had a chance to really see two very different kind of styles of lawyering. New York was very formal. I was in a group that was sort of considered a very formal area of the law to practice in, and then California, which at the time, particularly sort of near the start of the .com boom and [00:17:00] so forth, which was very much more of a sort of, as they would say back then, like a cowboy style.

You just tried things out and that was also intellectually challenging and interesting. At some point, it became clear to me that when clients are paying you, they're not always asking you to ask the hard questions or to look at the big picture issues. You're working on the matter that's before you, but sort of the larger implications of what you do or the big patterns are not things that you always get to do as a practicing attorney.

There is an academic colleague of mine who's written this great short paper and the way he describes it is when you are a practicing lawyer, you're the Beatle. And when you're the academic, you're the entomologist. And in some ways that is a very much sort of my experience because so much of the research that I do is about transactional law and transactional lawyering, and the now up.

I've been doing a lot of work on inequality [00:18:00] and kind of transactional practice or in corporate law, corporate governance, corporate litigation, and part of what I'm looking for are the patterns, the big picture, the changes, the fact that I can do research and do 15 years worth of cases and really figure out, okay, who's at the center of decision making when it comes to the most important corporate law cases. Those are not things that when you bill on. You know, in the billable hour that you really get a chance to do as an attorney. 

Vickie: Okay, so I am clear that you already had a plan. You knew - I'm going to land, I'll be a professor of law.

Afra: I thought I would be a professor of law doing human rights related research and not for law work.

Vickie: And so I love that. I want us to live for a moment because you were at the same law firm for a duration of time. What was that culture like? 

Afra: I think my experience was similar to what we continue to see at a lot of law [00:19:00] firms, which is that we had a fair number of women associates, even some at the mid-level.

We had a fair number of women of color and other people of color who were associates who came straight out of law school. Extremely few stayed and extremely few became partners, and I'm not even sure I ever worked on a significant matter with any partner who was a person of color the whole time I was there in the seven years I was there, there were a couple of smaller matters where I worked on a project where the partner was a white woman. That was extremely rare. Extremely rare.

Vickie: To that point, and thank you for really helping us to understand because on my end there's a lot I'm thinking. I'm wondering if your transition to Silicon Valley, if that opened up the door for you, where you are now and you've written various articles, you've done a [00:20:00] lot of research on gender, racial disparities. You talk, I actually read a couple of your articles, which are great, listeners, and I want you to share where everyone can locate your articles and she's written some books as well. I would love for you to share with us where you are now writing about gender and racial disparities.

Did your experience when you were practicing law inspire you? I know that eventually you landed where you are now, and your vision was human rights initially. But our experiences and successes of today, our experiences from the past often play a role in that. And so I'm just really trying to connect the dots to your passion and, and where you stand now as it relates to your focus.

Afra: Very much so. I mean, I think one of the big questions that I have worked through in my own research, because my research has really been on what does the state of the world look like with respect to gender and racial diversity, whether it's in corporate transactions, which I have studied with respect to [00:21:00] mergers and acquisitions transactions, whether it's with respect to corporate litigation or securities litigation, other areas of work that I've done.

Or whether with respect to investment bankers who play a really big role in corporate transactions. A lot of that was inspired by the lack of diversity that I would see, both from a gender and racial perspective when I was in practice and me now wanting to understand. So how much has changed, right? We went through an entire racial reckoning in 2020.

We have had women be now half of all law students, if not more. Since I was in law school, that was 25 years ago. At this point, my question was really like, you know, 25 years where we, we've been 50% of the incoming lawyers, 50% of the attorneys that are being hired, are we reaching leadership positions?

Because I didn't see those women in leadership positions or women of color in leadership positions when I was an attorney. But now is it different because [00:22:00] now it's 25 years later. And so part of my research is really inspired by understanding that and documenting where we have made progress, where we have failed to make progress, and what that means for the types of interventions that we need to make in order to really have a profession that is representative of our society and where our society is and should be.

And so that is, you know, I think it is connected to that work. I would also say I have been interested in issues of gender disparities specifically since I was an undergrad. So I was a women's studies minor. I wrote on the women's movement as my senior honors thesis. I was very involved in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law when I was in law school. I wrote my Columbia Law Review note on issues of women's nonprofit organizations and their involvement in [00:23:00] the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women. So in lots of ways, actually my academic research now as it relates to corporate law and corporate governance and issues of gender and racial disparities, I think in lots of ways it's all of these different experiences brought me to this.

So both my particular kind of more academic interest on inequality as well as then the personal experiences of inequality when I was at the law firm as a transactional lawyer, or that I experienced as a law student specifically. Now I feel like everything is kind of gelling together and really then kind of inspires me to do the kind of work that I do as an academic in terms of my research.

It inspires me in the classroom and in how I interact with my students and how I mentor students. In the students that I'll take under my wing. It inspires me in sort of the mentoring work that I've done as an academic for newer academics who are coming into the profession where I really want to create a very [00:24:00] inclusive profession when it comes to the legal academy, and I have taken specific concrete steps to try and play a role in advancing inclusion in the legal academy.

Vickie: Thank you. I, I love all of that. That's the saying that, I don't know if I made it up. Maybe I heard it, I've heard it somewhere in the past, but I often reference work begets work, and I think about where I am today and how my experiences and the positions that I've held in the past have actually led me to where I am today.

And so that's the reason why I asked you that question, because it sounds like everything is full circle at this point based on all of your experiences and, and all of that has been able to help further fuel you in this new space that you're in, which is awesome. So based on your experiences working within a law firm, and there have been some gradual changes, and I agree with you, it hasn't been a lot.

There's still so much work to be done as relates to diverse representation at the partner level within law firms. There's [00:25:00] so much work left to be done as it relates to impactful mentorship and impactful sponsorship that can place women and people of color in those partnering positions. So Afra, you spoke a little about mentoring earlier in our chat.

What additional thoughts would you like to share regarding mentorship and sponsorship of women and people of color within law firms? 

Afra: I mean, I think law is very much a relationship-based business and a lot of these relational aspects of law favor incumbents and incumbent lawyers. And a lot of times what lawyers will do is informally mentor other lawyers that remind them of themselves. And I think one of the things that law firms have tried to do is to put in programming and different kinds of training to address issues of diversity. I think what they haven't done as much of is to be really systematic about how they think about mentorship and [00:26:00] sponsorship and succession planning when it comes to clients succession planning, when it comes to different types of business matters, I think that there's a lot more work to be done on that front. I think also if you think about the structure of the business and how lawyers make money as a business.

There are things about the structure of the business that reward being available 24/7, and some of the work I have done has been like inspired by work that's been done by the economists like Claudia Golden, that kind of talks specifically about the inequalities that result from these very greedy professions.

And I think law and particularly law and elite practice at big law firms is an incredibly greedy profession, and that has disparate impacts on people with responsibilities outside of just what their job is. I think we've got to address issues of bias and implicit bias, and that is still something that is [00:27:00] very much there, and we need to think about systematically at all stages as we're going through it. I think we would want to think a lot about how do we foster greater amounts of mentorship from a lot of different potential mentors. As I said, I think at the beginning of the program, almost all of my mentors were white men, because that's the universe I lived in when I was a lawyer.

If they were incredibly important to my career, you don't have to have one mentor that is the mentor for all things. You could have different mentors for different aspects of what you hope to achieve. And I think what I would want is for women of color to have more of those opportunities for different types of mentors, to really then be able to be intentional about what they want to achieve in their career.

Vickie: So if you, because we have listeners who I'm hoping are in these positions of change and they can impact change. And if there was one tip [00:28:00] or maybe several, I'm open to any suggestions that you have, Afra, we have been discussing the representation as it relates to women and people of color and associate and senior associate roles.

But as it relates to the partner level, there's still a gap there. Succession planning. Impactful mentorship. Impactful sponsorship. And when I say impactful, I mean it's going to move the needle, like you raising your hand to say, yes, I'm going to mentor this associate. I'm going to sponsor this associate.

Is with the goal of eventually assisting them in getting into a partner role, what would be some recommendations that we're not seeing now, even if it's just one. Do you have any ideas of what could take place that would, could really encourage more impactful moves within law firms so that we can see more women and more people of color in partner roles?[00:29:00] 

Afra: I mean, one thing I think we should think about is how do we measure impactful partnership and sponsorship, and how do we reward that? These people are working. It's a job. And even the mentorship and the sponsorship aspect is part of the job. And so are those hours being counted? Are they then goes the impact measured in a certain way so that when you get your profits per partner at the, you know, you get your points at the end of the year.

How much of that is allocated to the work that you did as a mentor or as a sponsor, rather than just how much money did you generate from certain clients or how much business you brought in? I think one of the things that has been hard is a lot of times the people who do a lot of that work, that's time that they're not doing something else.

And if they are not being recognized and they're not being financially recognized for doing that type of work, then you think, why would I do it? And so [00:30:00] having real skin in the game for doing that work, I think it's something that would be important. And I think law firms have to think about systematically, how do we measure this?

How do we keep track of it? The same way that we keep track over what clients you bring in and how many hours you spend on those matters, and how much money you generate from those matters. Okay, well, how do we do that when it comes to mentorship and sponsorship specifically? Also kind of systematically keeping data on succession planning with respect to client matters.

Who are, you know, the smaller group of partners that are going to be taking over this matter once a partner retires, or if a partner is going to leave, why were those people selected? What interactions have we given them? What opportunities for interactions have we given them with respect to the clients?

And how do we do this in a way that's systematic and fair and inclusive? I think in some ways like not keeping data on some of this, it makes it easier, right? Then you do some, you know, training [00:31:00] programs and you have an event and you do some affinity groups. All that sounds great, but it's not really what people are making their money off of.

And I think keeping data on where are we making money? How are we rewarding people for doing that work? How much time does that work take to do it effectively? At what point are we imposing that responsibility on the various partners, and are we imposing that responsibility fairly? It can't be that you expect your women of color partners to then be mentoring all the other women of color, and then the white males go and get the clients and they make the money.

You have to think about how you allocate these responsibilities fairly across people. 

Vickie: Yeah, and I agree with all of that. And to your point of data, I mean, data really does tell the story. And I think that the bottom line, because a law firm is a business, right? And so we're going to look at the bottom line.

You know, what's bringing in the money? Who's bringing in the money? Who's in that room, like who is in that think tank that's [00:32:00] actually bringing in revenue for the firm? I think that when more law firms take the time to really take a look at the data, they'll see that diversity is more than just the right thing to do.

That it matters and it goes a long way. And when you have different people from different experiences, different backgrounds in a room, then it can actually drive revenue as well. And so I agree with all of that. The one thing that I'm glad that you spoke to  was inclusion, because what we really don't want is for anyone to be excluded.

We just want everyone to have a seat at the table and to have transparency as it relates to, you know, what does it take, you know…

Afra: And equal opportunity, right? Understanding what do I need to do to get to that level, and do I have equal opportunity to do that?

Vickie: Yes. Considering you have made a successful transition from practicing law to now being a professor of law, what advice do you have for women of color who wants to follow this path, or who solely aspire to be a legal academic?

Afra: [00:33:00] I would say if you want to enter academia, it's really thinking about what are the questions you want to answer. What are the problems that you want to tackle? Because in lots of ways, every research paper or every article that you end up working on is really a question, and you, saying, you know, knowing that you're going to have to dive in for the next year, year and a half, really digging in deep into that question.

I would also say you have to really think about whether you want to do the hard work of the mentoring and teaching of students. That is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job, but it's very, very different from the research work that I do in terms of the sort of the day to day of what that looks like.

It is really thinking about how do I make the material that I know fairly well and I've done lots of years of research on, accessible to a broad group of students with different learning [00:34:00] styles and different backgrounds and different levels of training? And so I think for someone who wants to go into academia, it's really understanding sort of the important aspect of that type of work.

And I think for women of color there are more and more opportunities for mentorship to really understand what your life as an academic might be like. And so there are a lot of organizations that do, for example, an annual conference on our workshops on women of color in the legal academy. And we invite, you know, fellows or aspiring academics to those conferences, partly because it's really important for them to make connections and meet people who are already in those positions so that they can really figure out, do I really want to do this or not? So I was lucky enough to be really involved in a workshop that we planned at Davis a few years ago that was for Asian American and Middle East, North African women in the [00:35:00] legal academy.

And some of the people at that conference were aspiring academics. They were not yet professors at any law school, but it was really helpful to then give them a chance to connect. People who were already in the jobs, that they really wanted to build those opportunities for connection and mentorship that was going to be important to them as they progress towards getting an academic job.

Vickie: In the introduction, I shared that you've written various articles on any quality and corporate law and corporate governance. Where can our listeners find your publications? 

Afra: I would say it depends on their area of interest, because I have written both a lot on inequality in corporate law and corporate governance, and so most of that work, luckily, law review articles are available for free online, and so for listeners, they don't have to pay for them.

They can go on my bio at UC Davis, and there's a link to sort of all of my various articles when [00:36:00] they look at publications. And so that is a great way to get access to some of the work that I have done, especially some of the work on gender inequality in corporate litigation or gender inequality in mergers and acquisitions practice, or when it comes to specifics of bias in the rule of investment bankers.

All those articles are available for download. They can just go on SSRN, which is sort of the social science research network available to anybody to download for free. One of the wonderful things about academia and legal academia is that we have worked very hard to make our scholarship easily accessible to members of the general public.

And one of the things that I have done, because our legal academic scholarship is really long, so the articles will be 70, 80 pages long, is that I also will have linked in my bio, kind of short summaries of those pieces. And particularly in corporate law, we have a lot of these sort of [00:37:00] well-known corporate law blogs that will invite us to contribute to, a thousand words or 1500 words that summarizes the research. And I think that's incredibly useful because I want busy attorneys or you know, judges or I want directors of publicly traded companies or private companies to have time to read that work and to be able to access that work without having to sit through the full 70, 80 pages of the research paper.

Vickie: So, before we say goodbye to our listeners, any parting thoughts on how we can bridge that gap between diversity and the law? 

Afra: I would say is for people to step back and think about what efforts we have made to advance inclusion in the legal profession. And whether those efforts really show us kind of a dedicated and sincere commitment and intentional kind of action with respect to inclusion or whether they are [00:38:00] window dressing.

And I think we have to be really honest with ourselves as we're addressing that question. And as we are evaluating different institutions, I work at a university, we have a large DEI office. They do a lot of work. I think it's always useful to look at those offices or look at that part of the program at any institution and say, what's the purpose of this?

Is this something that is actually making a difference in demonstrating our intentional commitment in all the ways that we actually run this institution? Or is this something that's on the side and they do some trainings and it sounds really great, and they do some events. But they're not really in the room when it comes to making the hard decision.

Vickie: Wonderfully stated. Thank you, Afra. I really, really, really appreciate you. Thank you for your time. I thank you for your insight. It was such a pleasure chatting with you, and I'm hoping that we can welcome you back at some point.

Afra: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to chat with you and thank you for doing this important [00:39:00] program and exposing your listeners to sort of all these different viewpoints.

Vickie: Thank you, listeners, for tuning in to today's fireside chat with Afra Afsharipour. We are so grateful to Afra for sharing her journey from being a practicing attorney at a big law firm to being an associate dean and professor of law at UC Davis. We hope that you were able to capture some nuggets from today's chat, and for those of you who are considering a career in legal academia, we hope that you were able to capture some nuggets as well.

Thank you again for listening to another episode of Not Your Average DEI Podcast.