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think it is worth weathering. [T]he rewards are quite significant, I think, to us as individuals, as thinking beings, as people who want to effect change. ON SACRIFICES ROTHSTEIN: [I]t is hard to recreate exactly why I stayed, except for that sense of wanting to overcome that obstacle, frankly, which is a bit irrational. They are no longer clearly defined in my mind, but there are all kinds of things that are very personal. Like, I remem- ber there were a whole bunch of female friends who felt profoundly guilty about going to work. I wasn't. I didn't think my kids were being inadequately taken care of by a nanny. I didn't think that I was going to be a less effective mom. I think for women who had that feeling, that they were really, in some measure, fail- ing their children, that was a huge sort of magnet that pulled them out of any sense of contentment when they came to work every day. ON CHILDREN MORAN: I always felt [in the academy] I was totally on equal footing . . . and I loved being dean. But . . . I felt that there were questions asked of me because I was a woman. There was a certain set of questions that would not have been asked with the man exactly like me. Part of it is about children. [O]ther deans have had many children, and it was never a question. But when you are a woman and you have a young child, all of a sudden, it is a question no matter what you have done. And so I have been quite aware of needing to respond to a slightly different set of questions and to sort of prove myself in a certain way. . . . SWANSBURG: And if you do want to have children, I say to people . . . there is no time like the present. You have to sort of separate your personal self from your work self and just decide that you want to have children and live with whatever the consequences are, which may or may not be significant. CHOWN: What I worry about is young women feel- ing the guilt and feeling the pressure when they have small children, [when] they are trying to build a prac- tice, is trading off momentary relief from the pres- sure by going to a less interesting job, or leaving the profession altogether, and back to this engagement, intellectual stimulation. And I am worried, then, about women in less satisfying jobs intellectually. So I www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com JUNE 2008 25 CHOWN: It is such a busy career. If I look as a litiga- tor and as a parent, I could do those two things but I didn't do things for myself. So, where male colleagues are playing squash and playing hockey and doing oth- er things that men do when they get together . . . there was just no time for that. So it is a sacrifice that you don't like to acknowledge at the time. ROTHSTEIN: I feel like some of my female friendships suffered over the years. I mean, I still have some very, very old friends, thank God, but there was very little time for them. So they have had to be very patient with me, because, like Kirby, I felt like there were only two things that I could possibly do at the same time, and that was raise children and practise law. MORAN: I guess I find it hard to imagine a world where I wouldn't push myself hard to do what seems to matter. So, when I think about it, I think what I have sacrificed, but it was probably inevitable, was ease. I have no ease in my life. CRONK: But if you look back on it after however many numbers of years it is — 25-plus for some at the table, 30 for a couple of us — I had no sense of making sacrifices at the time. But, when I look back on it, what was lost is hours and hours and hours of time, just time, thinking of the amount of time in the first 10 or 15 years of your career that you devoted to your career, as opposed to your friends or your family or your non-law interests. ON GETTING AHEAD CHOWN: I have two pieces of advice: No. 1, as a young