Andrea S. Kramer

Andrea Kramer has vigorously worked to remove discriminatory barriers to women’s career advancement for over 30 years. Despite her successful and demanding legal practice, Andie has helped thousands of women navigate both obvious and subtle gender-based obstacles to successful careers. Her keen insights into the nature and operation of gender bias and her pragmatic techniques for avoiding or overcoming these obstacles have made her a nationally recognized authority on gender discrimination, the nature and operation of stereotypes and biases, and practices and policies to increase women’s leadership opportunities. However, Andie believes strongly that gender is not the entire story. She has also focused her efforts on other workplace issues that hold women back in the workplace, including racial and ethnic biases, age biases, LGBTQ biases, and biases against mothers.

Andie is a partner in the international law firm of McDermott Will & Emery, where she was the founding chair of her firm’s Gender Diversity Committee and served on both her firm’s Management Committee and Compensation Committee.

She has a sophisticated and unique multi-disciplinary legal practice that covers all aspects of financial transactions and derivatives, focusing on taxation, regulation, contract design, trading operations, and documentation. She helps clients resolve difficult legal situations, including federal and state regulatory matters, adversarial proceedings, and tax planning and compliance issues. Since the early 1980s, Andie has helped shape legislative and regulatory policies with respect to derivative products and markets. In December 2011, Andie provided testimony on “Tax Reform and the Tax Treatment of Financial Products” in a historic joint hearing of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee.

Andie was named one of the 50 Most Influential Women Lawyers in America by the National Law Journal for her “demonstrated power to change the legal landscape, shape public affairs, launch industries, and do big things.” She also received the Founders Award from the Chicago Bar Association, the Women with Vision Award from the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois, the Inspiration Award from the Coalition of Women in Law Initiatives, and was named the 2014 Gender Diversity Private Practice Lawyer of the Year by ChambersUSA for her outstanding contributions to furthering the advancement of women in law.

Andie is the co-author, with her husband, Al Harris, of Breaking Through Bias (Second Edition): Communication Techniques for Women to Succeed at Work (September 2020) and It’s Not You It’s the Workplace, Women’s Conflicts at Work and the Bias that Built It (August 2019). She is also a co-author of the American Bar Association’s guide “What You Need to Know About Negotiating Compensation.” She has written hundreds of articles and blog posts and she is a Forbes.com contributor.