She wasn’t the only reason I went into this line of work, of course. But I do think she made a difference.

And research suggests that’s actually a pretty common pattern. A recent study by the Equality of Opportunity Project, a research program run jointly by Stanford, Brown and Harvard, found that women were dramatically more likely to become inventors if, as children, they had encountered female inventors.

Examples matter. Exposure matters. And exposure to Heidi Bond’s work mattered enough to me that I still remember it now, over a decade later.

But I also remember that shortly after law school, Heidi Bond disappeared from public life. Letters of Marque was deleted. She finished her subsequent clerkships with Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, then briefly became a law professor before departing the profession entirely. I occasionally wondered idly where she had gone, but never really looked for her — the closest I came was occasionally googling her old guest posts to reassure myself I hadn’t invented her entirely.

In a recent piece on her website, she explains what happened:

“If you did not know about Kozinski, it would be impossible to understand my career choices. I applied for jobs as a law professor, but I pulled out of the UCLA interview a month before I was scheduled to visit — I couldn’t bear to be anywhere I might see him on a regular basis. I withdrew from the hiring process at the University of Michigan, my alma mater — when I did the campus visit, it reminded me too much of who I had been before the clerkship, and I couldn’t handle the memory.”

“I got job offers and warm congratulations, and they hurt so much I could barely acknowledge them. I could not escape the notion that my career success was built entirely on my silence, and it poisoned any joy I could have found in the job I did take.