#1 | Élise Fabing, the lawyer hired after employees and women
Welcome to POING FORT, the podcast that will give you the weapons of self-confidence. In this first season, 10 guests take off their masks to talk to us frankly about the failures and doubts they had to overcome to achieve their ambitions.
In this very first episode, I had the privilege of meeting Élise Fabing, a lawyer specializing in employee defense and labor law.
Very early on, Elise was destined for a career as a lawyer. While she was doing an internship in a firm, she was the victim of an injustice that would be the starting point of her vocation: to free up speech around violence at work and sexist discrimination.
Self-confidence, failures, feminism, burn-out, #balance: so many topics for an engaged and fiery conversation that I invite you to discover!
Margaux: Can you introduce yourself?
I am a lawyer, specializing in employee defense and labor law.
So I only defend employees, never companies, and this for quite a long time. I was the lawyer for the #Balance accounts of the #MeToo movement at work. I specialize in defending women, so everything that is sexist discrimination, maternity discrimination in particular, equal pay.
I tried to publicize these issues of violence at work, because it still seems too ordinary for many people, while these situations are real tsunamis for the people who experience them.
I am quite proud to have contributed to this liberation of speech around these subjects, which were still very taboo when I started, thirteen years ago. I am co-founder of the Alkemist lawyers firm with Alice, and we have a great team.
And I wrote a first book, which is The Manual against Harassment at Work. I really have this obsession with access to the law.
Margaux : You said at the very beginning that the team was 100% female. Why did you make this particular choice?
Well, because already, we have a profession that is becoming very feminized. And then, I really wanted to launch and train female lawyers, to give them confidence. Because for us women, even if the profession is becoming more feminized, there are still mostly men who are associate lawyers. I do a lot of departure negotiations, executive management. I am very often the only woman at the negotiating table and I wanted to train women. And then, we are still a very feminist firm.
Margaux : How did the Balance accounts start?
Here we go, still a bit by chance. I saw Anne Wester's account on my feed, Balance ton agency! And I said to myself: this is super interesting, because it 's true that social justice is dysfunctional, there are quite a few things that are not going well and I saw it a bit like a cry of revolt from the weakest employees. And as in my Insta, there was the fact that I was a lawyer, she contacted me quite quickly because she was already threatened, but it was at the beginning of her account. We met and it was a great meeting. I admired her courage. Afterwards , we thought about how to make access to rights on her account for all employees.
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Margaux : And this second book, which is in preparation, how did you choose its theme?
I wanted to write a book about women and all the pitfalls they can encounter during their careers. It's a book about the price of silence for women in their careers. About how the world of work silences women, how companies, when women are victims of discrimination or harassment, will buy their silence. And I wanted to tell their stories, because, often, they have confidentiality clauses that they can't talk about. So, I wanted to give them a voice and explain to all women what can be experienced, throughout their careers.
And it's a pretty, pretty intimate book, and it wasn't easy for me, since I talk about my encounters. Because my job is also about stories of encounters. I meet incredible people, all the time. And they inspire me, all these women that I help, they are my heroines. They give me strength, they are very powerful.
And then, I often say that there are only happy endings here, because I also see them rebuilding themselves. I see them becoming different, reinventing their relationship to work, changing their lives. And it's completely fascinating.
Watch the episode:
