- November 25, 2024
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When Carol Hague was asked to lead a new women's group formed by the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce, her response was swift: “Absolutely not.”
Later, when the group's leader asked Hague to be a cofounder, Hague agreed to help out. That was, only if the group abided by her rules. “It can't be something trite,” Hague said. “I don't do Tupperware parties. I don't do weddings. I don't do female social club things. So if we're going to have cocktail parties, count me out. We need to have a real solid purpose.”
Purpose could be Hague's middle name. “I'm a purpose-driven person,” she admits. “I am a child of duty, not a child of play. I can't sit still for that long.”
Hague, 60, is chief operating officer of Johnson, Pope, Bokor, Ruppel and Burns, a firm of 42 lawyers. For the last 30 years, she's spent her free time as an adjunct professor at St. Pete College. She's served as a board member of the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce since 2006 and was chairwoman of the board in 2009 and 2010. She's now cofounder of the chamber's women professionals group, AchieveHERs.
This year Hague was awarded with the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce's Woman of the Year award and she's currently in the running for the St. Petersburg Chamber's Business Woman of the Year award.
Hague started working in the legal industry as a paralegal in 1973 for Fowler White in St. Petersburg. At the time, the women weren't allowed to wear pants to work. “It was a Hugh Heffner kind of thing, she says.” On her first day, her boss told her, “Just so you know, I think women should not be working. I think they should be at home.” Three years later, the same boss was telling her to apply to law school.
Hague was nicknamed “Blondie” by the men in the office, something she shrugged off and ignored. “That's just how it is. It's the South,” she told her family.
She started at the firm with the hopes of eventually going to law school. At the time, there were only two women lawyers in St. Pete. “It was going to be rolling a boulder uphill to be a woman in the practice of law,” she says, so she decided to pursue the administrative side of the industry.
Hague now oversees a team of more than 90 employees, including 42 lawyers in three offices — Clearwater, Tampa and St. Petersburg. Hague declined to share the firm's revenue, but did say that the company has recently grown, adding five lawyers to its team in January.
AchieveHers has stuck to Hague's “purpose-driven” rule, with a mission to provide a vessel where females feel safe talking to each other about their professional lives. The group's kickoff event sold out Ruth Eckerd Hall in St. Pete, and its mailing list touts more than 200 local women.
Women are always expected to do more, Hague says. Even if they work, they're “expected to nurture and expected to take care of the home and pick up the dry cleaning.” It doesn't make a different to Hague, who says, “I'm a person that never says 'no.'”
She also doesn't like complainers or those who make excuses. “I think it is time we stop talking about the glass ceiling and the tension between men and women,” Hague says. “We all just need to be very accepting of the differences in people and judge people by their work and by their credibility and by the value of their souls. Forget about all these other things we've talked about.”
Tips
Carol Hague has watched the legal industry transform from a male-dominated industry to a more even split over the last 40 years. Here are her tips for others in male-dominated industries.
“As women, not only do we lean in, we lean back. We let men take credit for everything,” Hague says. That's why women need to talk to other women to learn how to start bragging.
