If the odds of you achieving something were statistically zero, would you still go for it?
For Salle Yoo, now the general counsel of Uber Technologies, the answer to that question was a resounding “yes.”
As a young lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine, Yoo discovered an American Bar Association study that revealed that no minority women at the largest 200 law firms in the U.S. made partner over a ten-year period.
“The chance that they were at those firms was statistically zero,” she says of the 2008 study, the results of which have stayed with her through all these years. “That was meaningful to me because it meant that minority women were not making it into partnership.”
But instead of switching gears or going down a different path, Yoo decided that she needed to stick it out and make partner—if not for herself, then for all the female lawyers who would come after her.
She puts it this way:”I wanted to make partner not only for myself, but so that I could figure out how to do it so I could teach other women how to, kind of, crack that puzzle.”