Biglaw, Women's Issues

6 Reasons For Gender Differences At The Top Of The Legal Profession

Why does the gender imbalance in high-level legal positions persist?

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“See I know you can’t help me Mr. Intentional / The only help I need to live is unprofessional / The only wealth I have to give is not material / And if you need much more than that, I’m not available.” — Lauryn Hill

On Wednesday, Harvard Business Review’s Francesca Gino and and Alison Wood Brooks published an article titled, “Explaining Gender Differences at the Top,” which examined why women are underrepresented in most senior-level leadership positions across various industries. They noted that women make up “less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs, less than 15% of executive officers at those companies, less than 20% of full professors in the natural sciences, and only 6% of partners in venture capital firms.”

As noted by Julie Triedman of The American Lawyer, here is a more extensive list of women representation in leadership positions across various industries (with the percentage of women leaders in parentheses):

  • Nonprofit CEOS: 45%
  • Fortune 10 company executive officers: 19.8%
  • CPA partners: 17%
  • Commissioned military officers: 17%
  • Architecture firm principals or partners: 17%
  • Fortune board directors: 16.9%
  • Law firm equity partners: 16.8%
  • Top 10 tech company CEOs: 16.6%
  • Investment bank executives: 11%
  • Venture capital partners: 6%

So law firms are ahead of some professions concerning the percentage of women leaders, but within the legal field firms lag behind all other areas in their percentage of women (with the percentage of women leaders in parentheses):

  • Law school associate and deputy deans: 45.7%
  • U.S. appellate court judges: 33%
  • U.S. district court judges: 24%
  • Fortune 500 general counsel: 22.6%
  • Law school deans: 20.6%
  • Law firm equity partners: 16.8%

In the article “Minority Ranks at Large Firms Show Little Growth,” Regina Rodriguez, a litigation defense partner in the Denver office of Faegre Baker Daniels, tells Am Law’s MP McQueen that in private practice, partners get to choose the teams with which they work and share clients, and tend to choose people like themselves. That’s human nature, she says. This so-called affinity bias “is a very real phenomenon,” she says. “As a result, Big Law finds itself stuck in a pattern where, without women and diverse lawyers in leadership, we are less likely to promote women and diverse lawyers into leadership.”

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In terms of the disparity in compensation between women and men, Joan Williams, founder of the Project for Attorney Retention, has stated that with their heavy dependence on backroom negotiations, “the law firm compensation system is a petri dish for bias. Men benefit from the ‘halo’ effect; if they have a good year, they get a raise. If women have a good year, firms tend to attribute it to luck,” prompting women to be awarded one-off bonuses, rather than raises.

In their research article, Gino and Brook write, “[t]hough a great deal of research has provided evidence that bias and discrimination give rise to and perpetuate this gender disparity, in the current research we explore another explanation: men and women view professional advancement differently, and their views affect their decisions to climb the corporate ladder (or not).” They conclude that men and women have different preferences when it comes to achieving high-level positions in the workplace. Specifically, they note:

  1. Research has found that people view women as less competent than men and lacking in leadership potential, and partly because of these perceptions, women encounter greater challenges to or skepticism of their ideas and abilities at work.
  2. Research has found that men are more likely than women to engage in dominant or aggressive behaviors, to initiate negotiations, and to self-select into competitive environments— behaviors likely to facilitate professional advancement.
  3. Women tend to believe they have less time in which to attain a greater number of goals, and they are likely to experience more conflict in deciding which goals to pursue and which to sacrifice or compromise.
  4. Compared to male participants, female participants expected the promotion to bring more negative outcomes, which led them to view the potential promotion as less desirable than men did and to be less likely than men to pursue it. However, men and women expected the same level of positive outcomes from the promotion.
  5. It is also possible that women are overestimating the negative consequences associated with power, that men are underestimating them, or both.
  6. Women believe, unlike men, that assuming high-level positions would require them to compromise other important life goals. This is an assumption that is worth studying further.

Through their research, Gino and Brooks sought to answer this question: why does the gender imbalance in high-level positions persist? Do you agree with their findings? If not, how would you explain the disparity between women equity partners and men equity partners in the legal profession?

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Renwei Chung is a 2L at Southern Methodist University School of Law. He has an undergraduate degree from Michigan State University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Golden Rule: How Income Inequality Will Ruin America (affiliate link). He has been randomly blogging about anything and everything at Live Your Truth since 2008. He was born in California, raised in Michigan, and lives in Texas. He has a yellow lab named Izza and enjoys old-school hip hop, the NBA and stand up paddleboarding (SUP). He is really interested in startups, entrepreneurship, and innovative technologies. You can contact Renwei by email at [email protected], follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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