Long before earning the “Dr.” title before her name, Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich was a blazer-wearing nine-year-old with a creative mind, a reporter’s notebook from her journalist father, and a growing passion for law. Although her passion for law never left her, she encountered many more interests that shaped her journey along the way, including becoming a published novelist. Today, Rebecca is able to balance her love of law teaching with a dream job as the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Manager at Gowling WLG. When she first decided to pursue a legal career, she didn’t aspire to ever land a job like hers because the role did not exist at Gowlings or anywhere until much more recently.
Having grown up in a traditional household where women typically stayed at home, Rebecca drew on her mother’s articulate strength in the private sphere but found her first legal role model during her law course in high school, when she was placed with a female lawyer mentor from a big law firm. That mentorship experience was formative for Rebecca. It confirmed that her dream of becoming a lawyer was not an idle aspiration, but something achievable. From there, she went onto her undergrad where she got sidetracked through a love for Indiana Jones into the temptation to be an archaeologist. When she told her (then) boyfriend about her archaeology plan, he told her that she would be “too nice to be a lawyer” anyways. What her boyfriend probably saw as a supportive statement, Rebecca saw as a challenge. She jumped on the phone and registered for the LSAT. She also broke up with him, a move that foreshadowed her divorce, twenty years later, for many similar reasons.
She was not there, she remembers thinking, to conform to unexamined, traditional ideas about what a man thought was nice. Respected, memorable, to make a contribution. But, as the saying goes, “well behaved women seldom make history.” Rebecca went on to obtain her JD, an LLM, a PhD in law, to working as a Crown Attorney, and a law professor before joining the Gowlings team, and to most recently get her MBA.
She was not there, she remembers thinking, to conform to unexamined, traditional ideas about what a man thought was nice. Respected, memorable, to make a contribution. But, as the saying goes, “well behaved women seldom make history.” Rebecca went on to obtain her JD, an LLM, a PhD in law, to working as a Crown Attorney, and a law professor before joining the Gowlings team, and to most recently get her MBA.
As a white woman, Rebecca acknowledges she experienced certain privileges while she was simultaneously faced with gender barriers including sexual harassment early in her career. It is, as she says, in understanding the complex intersections of how social positions are located, that we can understand inequalities and through which we can seek to attain equity. Through her journey in law, she not only faced gender bias but also tackled tensions within her family life. She battled balancing a traditional family structure and the complexities of motherwork and gendered expectations while pursuing her career in law. Having given birth to four kids in the four years following law school, it is clear that Rebecca is family oriented.
Although she chose to make time to focus on her children while putting her career on the sideline, she wouldn't change a thing. “My children are my absolute top priority,” she says, unequivocally.
Rebecca learned from experience that the traditional legal path was not for her, through articling at a big law firm. While raising her family, she tried out several things including becoming the first PhD Legal Studies Program Graduate from Carleton University and working as a Staff Lawyer in Equality and Law Reform for the CBA. “I am still,” says Rebecca, “not sure what I want to be when I grow up. I know what I want to do. I want to contribute to law and to literature, but it’s not clear in the long-term how that will look.”
Throughout her career, Rebecca has worked to narrow down her passion to two interrelated areas: equality & teaching. Through her volunteer and professional work, she wants to emphasize that equality in her perspective must be substantive. Her work with Gowlings focuses on fostering equality, diversity and inclusion through programming, communications, and working on initiatives for recruitment and retention. Part of her role is to work with her team to align Gowlings’ values with their actions and hold them accountable when they deviate from that course.
Rebecca loves her job because she gets paid to do the work she was previously doing as a volunteer. She gets to advocate for something she genuinely and authentically believes in – equity- and can contribute to its progress in the legal profession.
Following her heart didn't not come without tradeoffs. Rebecca chose to prioritize her children while working for a cause she believes in and because of this, she turned away from the partnership track which would have resulted in bigger pay cheques. But how important is making more and more money? Rebecca believes “for business entities and for people, in doing well by doing good, in balance.” For Rebecca, her ideal income should be enough to support her family and her love for travel. Since her kids are happy and she makes enough money to travel to places like Santorini and Rome, where she can visit the historical sites, she wanted to explore as an archaeologist Rebecca does not feel limited financially by her job.
Rebecca recommends lawyers considering leaving financially comfortable jobs to ask themselves what they are giving away if they make less money.
If it is a bigger house or a nicer car, how much do they really want or need those things? What is lost in prioritizing that choice?
Rebecca focuses on what genuinely makes her happy and feel alive. “I haven’t taken a vow of poverty,” she laughs, “I support the imaginative innovation of business. I like nice things.” If what brings her joy is a Burberry purse, so be it! “But I,” she says, “think Macklemore said it pretty well – I make the money; I don’t let the money make me.” What matters most to her is having a career she loves while being able to take time off to travel and spend time with her kids. What is the point of making a higher salary if lawyers do not have time to spend it?
Law is not Rebecca’s only calling. Her favourite creative outlet is writing. Soon into her legal career, she realized how important the written word is to the profession. Having published quite a bit of legal writing, she found it depressing how infrequently academic writing is actually read. Rebecca couldn't help but be disappointed to learn that an average academic paper is read on average by 1.6 people (in Rebecca’s case that 1.6 would mostly likely include her mom, whose lively intellect and support she is forever grateful for, but doesn’t really help her achieve her objective of making a professional contribution). Rebecca turned to creative writing to engage with law, and with true events and imagine different possibilities for how these things are conceptualized and lived. Her novels explore some of the same things she explores academically. In fact, she interrogates many of the same questions but in a more creative way. Her fiction writing not only engages readers on more levels than an academic piece, but also makes her reflections more accessible to the public. For example, her new book “Ruin” addresses imagining a future of reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous populations and how that might look. She uses her novel to engage more people with true events by encouraging readers to wrestle with their personal truths and to use their imaginations.
Rebecca’s journey through law highlights how legal professionals can have multiple callings and should have hobbies outside of law.
At the end of the day, Rebecca is grateful to have a job she is passionate about and that supports the lifestyle she needs to be happy, which is, she notes, more basic and frugal in many ways than society pressures us to be.
Although it took her a while to find her dream job, Rebecca encourages others to keep looking for a career they are fulfilled in. “I came to a place of being happy through listening to an inner restlessness when I was not happy. I left behind comfort, and stability, more than once, because it simply did not resonate with my truth. I wish for all of my children, and for all of you, to be brave and vulnerable enough to live big, messy, wandering, authentic lives.”
One of her favourite quotes says it all: “I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you're not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald.
One of her favourite quotes says it all: “I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you're not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald.