According to the latest American Bar Association demographic report, there are
1,281,432 licensed lawyers in the United States. The Bureau of Labor estimates our current workforce at
157 million people, making lawyers only 0.8 percent of the working population. But within the membership of the 113th Congress,
41 percent are lawyers. Currently, both the president and the vice president are lawyers. And it goes without saying that the U.S. Supreme Court is made up of lawyers.
Lawyers appear to hold a lot of governing power in the United States. They write our laws, they enforce our laws, and they interpret our laws. So what better way is there for a woman to make progress than to become a lawyer, right?
Not so fast. There is a difference between being a man who is a lawyer and a woman who is a lawyer, and it is not just about the money gap, although that is an important factor.
And why should we care about the gender inequities faced by women in the top 5 percent of our nation's earners? Because if women who have studied the law, passed the bar, and practice the law, cannot achieve economic parity with men, what hope do the rest of us have?
Please join me below.
In 1970, women only claimed 8.5 percent of all law degrees. In 1972, Title IX of the Higher Education Act, which prohibited sexual discrimination in admitting students to law schools (among others), passed into law. By 1980, women made up 33.6 percent of graduates; today they earn
47 percent of all law degrees.
Women now make up 45.4 percent of all law firm associates, but only a quarter of all non-equity partners and 15 percent of equity partners, according to a 2014 report from the Center for American Progress. These figures are much worse for women of color who face the intersection of race and gender bias. They make up 11 percent of associates, but only 2.3 percent of partners.
Women of color continue to leave law firms at an alarming rate—75 percent leave their firms by the fifth year of practice, and nearly 86 percent leave before their seventh years.
And as if earning less than their male colleagues isn't bad enough, women lawyers face special challenges, from the time that
a law school advises her on her attire ...
I really don't need to mention that cleavage and stiletto heels are not appropriate office wear (outside of ridiculous lawyer TV shows), do I? Yet I'm getting complaints from supervisors ....
...
to judges like Judge A. Benjamin Goldgar of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois who:
... explained that female lawyers dressing too sexily is “a huge problem” and that “you don’t dress in court as if it’s Saturday night and you’re going out to a party.”
Or this, written by a
federal judge in Nebraska, who suggested that women lawyers not dress like "ignorant sluts":
Around these parts there is a wonderfully talented and very pretty female lawyer who is in her late twenties. She is brilliant, she writes well, she speaks eloquently, she is zealous but not overly so, she is always prepared, she treats others, including her opponents, with civility and respect, she wears very short skirts and shows lots of her ample chest. I especially appreciate the last two attributes.
Amanda Hess, writing for Slate Magazine, points out that one of the problems that women attorneys may face in deciding on appropriate attire is the lack of any female role models: At the top 200 law firms, only 4 percent have managing female partners.
Family leave policies, though offered by law firms, do not protect all women, as an attorney in Georgia found out last year. A sole practitioner, she requested a continuance on an immigration hearing since she would be on maternity leave on the scheduled court date. Her petition was denied, with the
judge explaining:
No good cause. Hearing date set prior to counsel accepting reproduction
Left with no alternative but to show up in court with her
baby in arms, she was then publicly berated by the same federal immigration judge for being a bad parent.
Perhaps this atmosphere would change if there were more women on the bench, but a 2012 survey showed that women occupy less than a quarter of all federal judgeships and only 27.5 percent of all state judgeships. There is a very long way to go.
A new study on workplace inequality in the legal field was just published in The American Lawyer and quoted in Bloomberg Business last week:
“She had always been the self-appointed ‘detail-oriented task manager on the team, scheduling meetings, keeping the calendar and taking notes,’” wrote the author of a broad study on workplace inequality in law, released by American Lawyer magazine last week, about one of the lawyers who journalists interviewed. The lawyer's male colleagues called her their “work wife.”
A woman lawyer is more likely to be assigned work that is less challenging, and frequently less lucrative, than her male counterpart. Her work will be billed as "word processing and fact investigations" while his is billed as "analysis/strategy," according to the study. It is not just the label of "work wife," that is a problem, it is the reality behind the label:
"Sometimes you'll see women doing the slide deck and men doing the presentation. If a woman tries to put her foot down, she's seen as not a team player.
Julie Triedman, writing in
The American Lawyer, notes that nine years ago, women were only 15 percent of equity partners in law firms. A push by the National Association of Women Lawyers to double that number within a decade, seemed to be working as 97 percent of the largest law firms began programs designed to train and retain women lawyers. There are now 16.8 percent of equity partners who are women. They figure that at the current rate of progress, they can achieve that 30 percent goal by 2081 and perhaps full parity by 2181.
The lack of progress can be blamed on a variety of issues, like how the recession of 2009-2010 limited the ability of the firms to take on many new partners. There is also a tendency to bring in partners laterally, and in a field where men are the overwhelming majority of law firm partners, that means more male partners via lateral moves. There is also the need women feel to take time off to have and raise children because the flex-time and part-time solutions offered at law firms are simply not filling the bill.
There has been a concurrent increase in the number of non-equity partnerships that some have called the "pink ghetto" as the number of women in this tier has increased while the equity partnership numbers have remained flat. The income at this level is about a third of what it is at the equity level, and there is almost no chance of moving into a leadership position.
Meanwhile, though they post similar billable hours, the gap between men and women in the value of business they generate has widened, and women on average got less credit for the business they did originate. Those facts are reflected in the earnings of women lawyers that are $250,000 less—or 32 percent lower—than their male peers, according to a recent survey.
Yeah, I know, it is hard to feel any real sympathy for someone whose annual paycheck is light by a figure that is more than 20 minimum wage workers make in a year, but given the fact that women in positions of power cannot exercise that power to ensure their own fair treatment, what chance does that woman working for a minimum wage have?