How Celebrity Legal Advisor Priyanka Khimani Made It To The Top In A Male-Dominated Field

It is not easy for women to carve a niche for themselves at the workplace, especially in male-dominated spaces. So how do women go about such fields and what more can be done to encourage women to dream bigger and ensure that the path that they choose remains open for other women to follow?

Prominent legal and strategic business adviser Priyanka Khimani, who has represented many noted personalities from the entertainment space like Lata Mangeshkar, Sonu Nigam, Badshah, Mallika Dua, Vir Das, Shankar Ehsaan, Loy, Shreya Goshal, and many more, recently took out time to speak with SheThePeople.TV on the challenges that women face in the sector of law. She is the founder of Khimani & Associates and was named on Forbes Top 100 Lawyers List for the year 2021. Khimani has come a long way from writing screenplays and working in theatre during her early days, to helping entertainers safeguard their rights and getting their due.

Priyanka Khimani on choosing law for the sake of a steady paycheck

Not many know that Priyanka Khimani comes from a very humble background. In the initial months after she was born, her parents raised her in the back of a photocopy shop outside Mahim Station. Afterwards, the family moved to a chawl where she was brought up. Khimani refuses to let go of the photocopy shop even today as it reminds her of a time that is extremely special and still feels like home. She believes that what she is today is a sum total of that upbringing and those experiences that she had.

Growing up, Priyanka Khimani didn't aspire to be a lawyer. She was actually a theatre person and eventually began modelling, and then writing scripts before she became a legal consultant. She reminisces that she was one of those kids that dabbled in everything and was pretty competitive.

"Growing up in a chawl, I grew up listening to and picking up a lot of different languages, she recalls, adding, "Theater happened for  the love of it because I genuinely do enjoy the creative side of things. And that led to writing eventually led to being on set learning everything that you need to know about the entertainment business what's the process of something whether it's a radio show, a TV show, and eventually, after these, I ended up with law."

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Pursuing a career in that sphere of theatre and screenwriting was a challenge back then, much before social media and the creative economy space blew up. So as a young girl in her late teenage years, and early 20s there wasn't much scope of growth for a writer. As Khimani had a family to support due to her father's untimely demise and came from an academic family where most of the people were engineers and doctors, Khimani decided to shift gears and opt for a different line of work.

"It was literally that consistency of a paycheck that made me say yes to the job that I got from my college's law school placement cell. And then, you know,  it was I think, a matter of luck that I got at the right place at right time. But yeah, that is the honest truth behind me. Choosing law as a profession," she says.

Being a woman on top in a male dominate field

Khimani achieved unparalleled heights in two heavily male-dominated industries ie., legal and entertainment. Men always try to fraternise with men at the top and have created this glass ceiling that women have to try and break through. So how can men and women work together to change this situation?

The celebrated legal advisor believes that the professional chemistry between men and women is still lacking. Some of the men in the industry have extremely flourishing professional relationships with women but even then, at a certain point, they are not looking at that woman as their work buddies or counterparts. "This is more peculiar as far as India is concerned. I think culturally, men in our country still struggle to treat a woman as their equal," says Khimani.

She also points out that men have sometimes very weird notions about women as to how busy or not is she going to be? "If she's about to get married and she's had a baby if she wants to focus on her head that she has to take care of a parent, or sibling and we still don't think of a lot of these questions when it comes to men having the same issues."

Gender Pay Gap And Power Dynamics

Another struggle that women working in male-dominated space face it that of pay disparity. Khimani believes that the gender pay gap and the dynamics in the entertainment industry is a socio-cultural issue and not an industry-specific issue alone. And what about the legal field? Knowing how vast this pay gap is in this field, women have to work very hard to prove their worth.

Since Khimani has been there, done that, she does have some advise for women who wish to pursue a career as legal advisor. "... do not substitute that knowledge is not you reading blogs, headlines of articles, etc. Knowledge is that's all information. It's not wisdom. So don't mistake one for the other. Put your head down, just blur out all of the noise. It took me almost 18 years overall to reach this point today and I believe it's still an upward and a long climb."

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