"Lean In" to listen to what older female professionals have to say.

While the @LeanIn brand has been enormously successful, it is built on the model of 35-45 year old successful women guiding others on similar tracks. They and millennials both too often think that "women in the workforce" begins with them. In some ways, they may be right, as unicorns and instant mega-successes may have more highly-placed women than big corporate America, or Europe or even Asia did 30 years ago. Yet, women still are falling behind, are under-compensated and too often overlooked in the real world.

There is a value to knowing history. There is a value to understanding what came before. And there is a value that women my age can provide as mentors to anyone under 50. We've been there and done that. Maybe not in exactly the same ways, but in our own way - which may be helpful to women today.

I began on Wall Street as an international corporate lawyer, specializing in M&A over $1 billion and hostile takeovers. While we had many women lawyers, they practiced mainly in the "female-friendly fields" of trust and estates, labor, ERISA, bankrutcy, IP and NGOs. The harder, tougher roles in M&A, hostile takeovers and innovative legal fields (transponder and satellite funding, for example), fell largely to men. Women might start there as young associates but were burned out, had different priorities or were mentored into other areas of law as more "suitable." Women in investment banking at the "big boy table of $1billion+" were even more rare.

When I began on Wall Street, most women professionals wore navy blue skirt suits, navy mid-height heels, stockings and white blouses, often tied at the neck. I wore dresses and red high heels (until a senior partner with a shoe fetish began walking into conference rooms seeking me out and bent over to look at my shoes under the conference table with a creepy grin).

We were expected to look alike, act alike and toe-the-line. It was tough when you were often evaluated based on the number of hours you could stretch the work into, rather than efficiency. If you developed business, even big business, before the requisite year pre-partnership, they had no idea what to do. So, counter to business 101, they discouraged rainmaking for associates. Toe-the-line.

Like an episode from Mad Men, too often a partner would lay his hand on your knee to look more closely at a document you were editing together, and speculations about bra sizes were more commonplace than anyone could now imagine. While you sat there wondering if it was accidental and you were over-reacting, you also knew that reporting anything would cost you your career.

Women associates fell into two groups - those who wanted to rename "history" to "herstory," and the rest of us who were just trying to get along, do our work and survive with integrity, relationships and family intact. I fell into the second group.

I came to law as a second career. I had been involved in our family businesses and investments and had two young children and a husband finishing his medical residency in tow. When I became a single-mom (partly as a result of the demands of work), I would come home to have breakfast with my children and car-pool, even if I hadn't slept the night before while stockpiling billable hours and doing the partners' bidding. All-night supermarkets were my lifeline, as I shopped at 3am only to be on the 7am train back to Manhattan.

Some creepy partners who still lived with their mothers at the ripe old age of 60 would order me to go to their hotel room and pack their bags for our flight back home from out-of-town meetings. I quickly learned who wore "tidy-whities, boxers or briefs whether I liked it or not. When partners thought about equality, they would have us carry their briefcases. Not all of them. But too many of them. Those looking to change things then were, largely, junior partners without the influence to change things.

So, I opted to leave, take some of those clients I had developed against policy and a few others :-), and created my own law firm. Not easy when you did billion dollar deals surrounded by 2000 other lawyers ot answer your every question. But I was successful breaking the rules. I established innovative billing practices, where clients had a fixed fee for certain work. The more efficient I was, the more profitable I became. And together with a handful of other (male) lawyers, we by accident founded the field of cyberlaw through our evening online chats that were watched with interest by judges. (Who knew?)

I know this is starting to sound like one of those "I trudged through 5 feet of snow, uphill both ways..." stories. But history (or herstory) repeats itself. Uber-PR-disasters are potentially everywhere. And we, as women of all ages, need to lean in, lean over and bend down to reach all women and share what we know and learned the hard way.

We need to point out options and opportunities, innovations and collaborations. We need to help you spot challenges before they become insurmountable, when to take a U-turn and when to take a stand.

We own it to each other, and to our children of both genders and to ourselves.