On a recent night in San Francisco, the woman representing the Google engineer famously fired for arguing women aren’t genetically suited to work in tech doesn’t have it in her to attend a dinner of her peers. Those peers – other San Francisco judges and attorneys-run the spectrum, in her view, from liberal to far lefty. The sort of people she’s surrounded by and specializes in riling up. But it can be exhausting.
“If I go today, I’ll be devoured by judges and attorneys asking me how I could represent James,” Harmeet Dhillon says of the annual bar association dinner. This was in January, months after her new client, James Damore, became an inescapable flashpoint in the workplace-gender war. Dhillon had just finished an interview on Fox News, where she makes regular appearances. She ditched the dinner and sat down for another interview instead.