I’m beat. Just watched the Jennifer Aniston special on E! because I was too stuck in the sofa to get away. I have to pop out my contacts and go to bed, but I did want to link to this article in Times from Sunday, which looks at why so few partners are women.
I feel like we’ve covered this ground many times on this blog. We’ve talked about why more women aren’t political bloggers, columnists, academics, advertising CEOs (links later). Is it worth bringing up again? Well, the lawyer issue is a big one. Unlike other fields, women start off in high numbers. May even be outnumber men from law school. But their numbers at the top of their field are outrageous. Only 17% of partners are women.
It’s a long article, which touches on many of the factors that have affected women in other fields — the kids, the lack of mentoring, the lack of self-promotion.
Is there anything specific about law that makes it unfriendly to women? The article briefly mentions that the whole billable hour thing of law is especially hard on women. In an e-mail, Jeremy mentions that maybe more women are choosing part time work in law, since there are many opportunities for that.
In my highly unscientific focus group of friends who are lawyers, they all hate their jobs. One wants to be film writer, but he can’t quit until he sells a script. Another wants her academic husband to get a real job, so she can quit. The other is getting trained to become a physical trainer. Could it be that everyone hates being a lawyer, but only the women escape?
Apt. 11d 
OK, I feel compelled to chime in just to say that I really like my job (this, despite the fact that my blog pops up whenever someone searches “I hate being a lawyer”). I don’t love every aspect of it, but then I’ve never liked every aspect of any job I’ve ever had.
I’m not disagreeing with your observations, though. I know a fair number of my colleagues hate their jobs.
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I used to work in an accounting firm (similar both in the fact that graduate entry is 50% female, and partners are about 15%). There was the tyranny of the billable hour, but I don’t think either place is any better or worse than a similar sized corporate. My accounting firm had 3,000 people, the partner group was about 250. If you take the top 10% of any organisation (mgt structure wise) would you find more than 15% female? The corporate I have joined is about the same.
Women generally leave to go to smaller places, and they generally leave well before having children. Maybe women are more likely to follow their heart if they hate the law (or accounting) because they don’t feel the same breadwinning expectations as men.
I know that even though I have always assumed that I will support myself throughout my life, becoming the main breadwinner of my family of 4 was surprisingly stressful. Suddenly I really was on the corporate treadmill for the long term – I could always get off before and just live really simply.
A bit of a grab-bag response, sorry.
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APL — Why do you think that women aren’t making partner?
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Laura, I definitely don’t have an answer, especially because the partner/non-partner issue isn’t a black-or-white, either-or thing. A lot of the women who “aren’t making partner” aren’t exactly dropping out of the legal workforce. They’re hanging their own shingles (which is incredibly brave for any attorney, regardless of sex) or moving in-house. About 50% or more of the General Counsels I work with are women. These are high-paying executive positions which can demand as much time as (if not more than) firm partnerships.
I’m assuming that most of these women, at one time or another, worked for a firm. But I don’t know what drove them away from the firm… or, on the other hand, what drove them to go in-house or solo.
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My wife is not at all sure she WANTS ‘partner’. She’s of counsel, has a manageable time commitment, together we make more money than we need, the house is paid for, and she is usually home in time for dinner and bedtime stories. What’s not to like?
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“Home for bedtime stories and dinner” — that’s so key.
Maybe the question should be: why are so many men digging themselves an early grave and missing out on playing with their kids by working the mega hours as partner? Why aren’t enough men looking at the creative ways that women have managed to balance work and family and follow their example?
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I personally feel that men are harshly judged if they prioritize family. Whereas a woman can be viewed as careerist and still insist on leaving at 5:30, for a guy it’s a tougher sell.
Additionally you have to keep in mind that for many guys they’re under severe pressure *at home* to produce cash. When I worked in strategy consulting, many of my colleagues had wives who had specifically chosen their husbands for their ability to maintain a certain lifestyle. I particularly saw the pressure to have a big house in the right suburb. I can’t tell you how many guys in that office were fighting with their wives over buying new houses — they didn’t want to be chained to the mortgage, but the wife was insisting on it for various different reasons. In a certain sense these guys had plenty in common with their wives: they both loved his money. But it did not make for good work-life balance.
Just imagine working in the same office as a guy like that. He will traverse heaven & earth to secure his gig, and has the full support of his wife to stay as late as it takes. The one time I’ve actually heard someone say “I’m not going to tell you how to do your assigned job on this project, because if I do you may replace me,” it was a guy who was married to this kind of person.
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I just posted on this last week. I think a big part of what’s going on is that the way law firms are structured, you don’t make partner without a mentor. It’s not about quality of work product (except insofar as quality of work product helps you acquire a mentor, which it can) it’s about who in the partnership already is going to go to bat for you. Women just have a much harder time attaching themselves to a male partner (and at least in litigation, there aren’t enough female partners to be much use) than other men do.
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Good post, LizardBreath. I like that “same-sex” flirting thing you talked about. I’ve seen a lot of that in academia and it always makes me gag. Fear of crossing the line makes it harder for women to do some old fashioned “sucking up.” On the other hand, my advisor in grad school was a woman, and I sure saw a lot of guys sucking up to her. Boy, did she love that. Are guys better at sucking up?
Thanks for the input. I’m a little sick of the work-family stuff and I want to look at other reasons why women, especially those without kids, are having trouble getting to the top.
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Laura, I will try to do a real post on this, but I think your question about “why are so many men digging themselves an early grave and missing out on playing with their kids by working the mega hours as partner” is the wrong question. The gender split among partners is real, but only a small minority of all lawyers, male or female, become partners in firms. Most men do not. The question is why the minority that does break through to the partnership is so heavily male.
And at the risk of getting slagged, I’m going to post a <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-marlowe012802.shtml" link to the old Ann Marlowe piece I e-mailed you about.
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Good. Please do. I admit huge ignorance about the legal profession, but am interested to learn more from you.
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Dr Manhattan, it’s an interesting article, but part of the reason that women don’t take pride in their ability to earn the big bucks, and be in powerful position (which is the reason the article gives for their inability to make it to the top) is because if they do, they are labelled as anti-feminine. I’ve seen that kind of behaviour celebrated in men, and excoriated in women.
While the mentorship thing is real, I do believe the real reason (from a different professional services firm background) is a reluctance to put in the big hours at a stage in their lives when they are also likely to be having children.
I made partner young (ish – 30) and hadn’t planned to have children. Luckily, I had them after I made partner, when you have far more flexibility, because you’re the boss. With kids, I wouldn’t have been willing to put in the hours I did to get there, which I did at the time because I loved my work.
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Sorry, one more thing – and the law firms (and other professional services firms) are missing out on a huge talent base because of their reluctance to look beyond the people willing to work 60+ hour weeks in their 20s and early 30s.
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Mmmm. I have a poorly thought out rant on the evils of the billable hour system (it encourages law firms that want to raise rates by increasing the number of hours spent on each task, rather than increasing the price per hour. Thus, you get an incredible amount of unproductive busywork that clients get charged for. If bills weren’t by the hour, clients would end up paying the same money for the same work product, but the junior lawyers would put a lot less time into it) that I need to write out one of these days.
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Seems like lawyers, at least in the New York area, put in more hours than any other big power job around. The stock brokers are crazed, but their work ends when the market closes. And anyone in finance gets a lot of vacation time, because they have to compete with the European offices. Lawyers put in 12 hour days. These sort of hours are incredibly difficult on parents, especially mothers.
But what about women who don’t have kids? Do they hate the billable hour thing and the 12 hour days more than guys?
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To her dismay, Marlowe makes the argument that women are less willing to put in the mega hours and care less about advancement than men. Is Marlowe right? Should women care more?
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So, I’m driving around town doing errands, thinking about Marlowe, and getting irate. I think women are willing to put in the hours and are ambitious and all that stuff. I worked my ass off to get a PhD and still write academic articles in my spare time. Women may be less willing to put in those hours after they have kids and may feel less pressured to do high powered jobs that they hate, but ambition they have.
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Lizard, your complaints about billable hours are very common and often true, but I think you’re missing a key benefit that’s relevant here. Billable hours provide an objective measure of work that can be useful in negotiating or implementing a flexible schedule. Working from home on a regular basis, or leaving earlier and working after the kids go to bed, is easier to negotiate if you can point to a measure of hours and show the lack of a decrease. It lessens the pressures for “face time.”
Laura, NYC big-firm lawyers work very long hours, but the hours of their peers at investment banks are longer still. (Especially at the grunt levels; I’m not sure if it matches up at the managing-director levels.)
But law also has lots of in-house jobs that pay fairly decently with hours that are predictable and less than the equivalent firm job. I work in a field where the hours are less extreme and more stable than many other corporate fields. The in-house law department at our biggest client is disproportionately made up of women, many of whom have kids of all ages – including the head of the department, who leaves religiously at 6:00 or so to get home to the kids. (To reference Laura’s post from a while back about Steve and the Blackberry: it is one thing to resist it as an incursion of the workplace into previously inviolate time, but for those who already have demanding jobs that require time outside the conventional workplace or workday, the Blackberry is an absolute godsend and can be a boon to the work-family balance.) She and her colleagues may not be partners in a law firm, but they make very good salaries without working insane hours. A large number of men utilize these alternatives as well. But insofar as women are more likely than men to seek out more balanced options in all professions – for reasons of biological clocks, socialization, oppression, you name it – it makes sense that such alternatives would skim off many women who could otherwise make partner. (This is the biggest difference between the comparative structures (i.e., the partnership track versus the tenure track) of law firms and academia: the former have many viable alternatives, and the latter has…Starbucks?)
In terms of whether more women should care about making partner, that’s a whole post unto itself. But I can unequivocally agree with Marlowe that women who do wholly commit to doing what it takes to make partner are unlikely to be held back for gender-related reasons.
Also, those who look at their jobs as “as a trial to overcome, the workday as an ordeal, the late hours as a punishment” are unlikely to advance to the highest levels, regardless of gender. Far too many lawyers of both sexes – especially at big firms – view their jobs exactly that way. I doubt many such people end up making partner (a job that has aptly been characterized as “winning a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie”). If Marlowe is right that women are more likely than men to have that viewpoint, for whatever reason, it makes sense that such attitudinal discrepancies would show up in the partnership ranks. Another way of looking at it might be that women and men may be equally likely to hate their jobs, but men are more likely to feel like they have no alternative but to stick it out (perhaps for a combination of lacking-a-biological-clock and socialization issues). If that point sounds familiar, it’s because it was one of the main sub-themes of the infamous Lisa Belkin “opt-out” piece. I know that it’s practically a ritual requirement on these blogospheric discussions of work-family issues to criticize Belkin’s piece (for any number of reasons), but I think she was on to something there. And as long as we’re praising Belkin, my personal experiences have matched Belkin’s assertions that women’s insistence on more flexible arrangements have “trickled down” to men as well. Linda Hirshman’s infamous subjects may have included no men who took paternity leave, but many men in my large law firm (not one that has a particularly “family-friendly” reputation, though that doesn’t match the reality) have taken such leave (4 weeks worth!), as have I.
Finally, if Marlowe is right that women who might otherwise find professional satisfaction in demanding jobs disproportionately have been socialized to disavow such ambitions, I think that’s wrong.
To really finish for now, I think that law firms could do a lot to change the way the partnership track operates, in ways that would make it much more female-friendly (and male-friendly, as well). The best piece written on the topic was by Brad DeLong, apropos of the Larry Summers kerfuffle and regarding the “tournament” structures of law firms and academia.
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Far too many lawyers of both sexes – especially at big firms – view their jobs exactly that way. I doubt many such people end up making partner (a job that has aptly been characterized as “winning a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie”). If Marlowe is right that women are more likely than men to have that viewpoint, for whatever reason, it makes sense that such attitudinal discrepancies would show up in the partnership ranks.
It’s really hard to tell which way the causation goes. I’m a couple of years from making partner, and the women I see around me seem less happy than the men, because they don’t see themselves as likely to make partner. Not that they aren’t doing the work, but that they don’t perceive themselves as being on the partnership conveyor-belt. Do we not make partner because we’re unhappy, or are we unhappy because we don’t see ourselves as likely to make partner?
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Lizard, the way you phrased it, it sounds like either way, the key is the attitude – i.e., being unhappy because “we don’t see ourselves” as being on the partnership track. In your case, do the women have more objective reasons to believe they’re not on the partnership track (the way they’ve been treated, etc.)?
Also, at what stage are the women who feel this way – similar to yours, or more junior? I don’t know how big your firm is, but I think a large part of the problem at big firms – where they hire huge classes of associates each year and have most of them depart within a few years – is where women (and men), who might have good chances at partnership if they made it to the end of the process, leave the firm before such lawyer could be considered to be on or off the “partnership track.” I think that Marlowe is right that women who make it to the end of the process have chances as good as those of men. The problem is getting women through the process without losing them earlier on. Are the women you refer to merely contemplating the long odds facing all big-firm associates at the beginning, or have they already gotten most of the way towards the end and been shunted off?
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This is all anecdotal, but, at the first two places I have worked, 3 women and no men made partner. This is odd because I do patent procecution work which starts out with significantly more men than than women associates.
I think the type of work I do makes a difference. It does use billible hours, but you need to be efficient. There is a limit to what clients will pay. Nobody works crazy hours because you really need to be alert to do the work. There are also relatively few rush deadlines.
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Thanks for reminding me of that deLong piece. It was good. Fascinating discussion, btw, about expectations of success.
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The saddest thing about that NYT piece on women making (or not making) law partner: For me it was when the subject of the piece, who had made partner, said her idea of keeping family life going was having one parent at home for dinner most nights.
One parent? Most nights? That’s just kinda sad to me.
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Me, too, Mo. We’ve got one parent every night. Steve doesn’t come home until 8:00, so he gets nuked leftovers. On the weekends, we go overboard with dinner rituals to make up for his absense during the week.
Hey, where’s your post about Big Love?
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we do both each night by feeding the kids later than is optimal (7 or 730) and I cook. This past weekend she cooked dinner one night and the kids were bowled over – Mommy can cook! And, 6 would be better, but Mommy here for dinner is important. So we do what we can.
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People should be judged on their minds by college admission officers, not the accidents of their births. The myth that geographical diversity or racial diversity will bring intellectual diversity is a fallacy, it seems to me.
I was a pro-monarchist conservative when I applied to colleges–which should have made the diversicrats salivate–but it didn’t do me an ounce of good.
They’re only interested if people look different but think the same.
But you have a point, except boys are too often victimized by effeminate approaches to learning, such as reading books about “relationships” in junior high and high school. A real turnoff to reading for us guys who’d rather read about war or adventure.
So file under “What Goes Around Comes Around.”
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