Biglaw, Partner Issues, Women's Issues

7 Highlights From The 2015 Survey On Retention And Promotion Of Women In Law Firms

Hopefully we are not one hundred years away from gender equality in the partnership ranks.

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“Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem / Baby girl, respect is just a minimum.” — Lauryn Hill

On Tuesday, the National Association of Women Lawyers released the Ninth Annual National Survey On Retention And Promotion Of Women In Law Firms. Lauren Stiller Rikleen introduces this report by stating:

In 2006, the National Association of Women Lawyers issued its NAWL Challenge: Increase the number of women equity partners, women chief legal officers, and women tenured law professors to at least 30 percent by 2015. As reported in the First Annual NAWL Survey, “The impetus for the Survey grew from the now familiar ‘50/15/15’ conundrum: For over 15 years, 50 percent of law school graduates have been women yet for a number of years, only about 15 percent of law firm equity partners and chief legal officers have been women.”

As Rikleen notes, for many years, NAWL’s Survey was the only national study that annually tracked the professional progress of women in the nation’s 200 largest law firms by providing a comparative view of the careers and compensation of men and women lawyers at all levels of private practice, as well as by analyzing data about the factors that influence career progression.

Here are seven highlights from NAWL’s Ninth Annual Survey:

  1. Men continue to be promoted to non-equity partner status in significantly higher numbers than women. Among the non-equity partners who graduated from law school in 2004 and later, 38% were women and 62% were men.
  2. The compensation gender gap remains wide. The typical female equity partner earns 80% of what a typical male equity partner earns, down from 84% in the first survey. Thus, the gap reported a decade ago has gotten wider.
  3. Women continue to be under-represented on the highest governance committees. The typical firm has 2 women and 8 men on their highest U.S.-based governance committee —around 20% women.
  4. Women are under-represented on compensation committees. Yet, law firms that report more women on their compensation committees have narrower gender-pay gaps.
  5. The typical female equity partner bills only 78% of what a typical male equity partner bills. However, the total hours for the typical female equity partner exceeded the total hours for the typical male equity partner.
  6. Lawyers of color represent only 8% of the law firm equity partners. In other words, 92% of biglaw partners are white.
  7. Women have not made “appreciable progress” since 2006 in either attaining equity partnership or increasing their pay to be on par with their male colleagues once they grasp the brass ring. As Bloomberg highlights in NAWL’s report: “Women represent 18 percent of equity partners, an increase of two percent since 2006.”

With regard to these findings, Bloomberg reports:

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“This new survey highlights the glacial pace in leveling the playing field for women in large firms,” says Deborah L. Rhode, Director, Center on the Legal Profession and E.W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford University. “To make progress, we urgently need initiatives on three levels,” she says. These include strategies to address unconscious bias, gender stereotypes, women’s exclusion from informal networks of support and development, and finding ways to reduce work/family conflicts.

Rhode’s thinking is echoed by Bobbi Liebenberg. “There are a lot of implicit biases,” that hold women back, she says.

While Sharon E. Jones, a member of NAWL’s Board of Directors and Chair of its Survey Committee, sees the problem in firms primarily as one of “intention on the issue,” she stressed that this is not the time for hand-wringing, but for “renewed commitment.”

Hopefully we are not one hundred years away from gender equality in the partnership ranks of the legal profession. Diversity and inclusion have a long way to go in our industry, but at least legal markets like Denver are beginning to make headway in these areas. We are now in the fourth quarter of 2015. What has your firm done this year to promote diversity and inclusion in the legal profession? More importantly, what do you plan to do to address these issues?

Ninth Annual National Survey On Retention And Promotion Of Women In Law Firms [National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL)]

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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