Finance

Gender Pay Gap In The Legal Profession May Have A Relationship To Publicized Trump-Era Misogyny

Did misogyny in the national discourse empower supervising attorneys to just let their unconscious biases take the wheel for a while?

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I spent last Saturday at the Sinclair Lewis Writers’ Conference, which takes place in ol’ Sinclair’s hometown, the original Gopher Prairie itself, Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Great conference if you, like the fictional Carol Milford before you, bewilderingly find yourself in the area.

The average age at this conference was about 75. Not that I’m complaining. I generally like the aged. I did, however, have an epic lunchtime argument with some loafered old fossil who decided to ask the whole table what we thought “about this whole Kavanaugh thing” and instead of actually letting anyone answer, he launched into an elaborate monologue on George Soros conspiracy theories being behind Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony. He was one of the manicured low-information voters who doesn’t know he’s an idiot because he reads all the right wing blogs and has never found anyone to outwit him in Gopher Prairie. Well, I wedged in and very much told him what I thought. I suppose it was lost on this doofus that Sinclair Lewis was the namesake of the conference. It Can’t Happen Here was a topic of the excellent keynote speaker. One of the presenters was literally a Willa Cather impersonator. Sigh.

So, this week, I am writing on a related topic suggested by my highly intelligent girlfriend: whether “this whole Kavanaugh thing” and public attacks on women like it bear some relationship to the financial disadvantages women have in our own profession.

The gender pay gap in the legal profession has been well-documented and reported upon, by Above the Law and others. The ABA even compiles a handy annual report from their Commission on Women in the Profession. Included in the 2018 report are numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics expressing female lawyers’ weekly salary as a percentage of male lawyers’ salary. If you look back to 2013, the median weekly earnings of women working full-time in the legal profession were 78.9 percent of the men’s salary median. By 2014, women were earning 83 percent compared to their male counterparts. The gap continued to close in 2015, when the women’s salary median stood at 89.7 percent of the men’s median. But in 2016, the gender pay gap widened precipitously, with women lawyers’ median weekly earnings clocking in at only 77.6 percent of median male lawyers’ earnings. From 2015 to 2016, the median weekly earnings for men who are lawyers went up (from $1,914 to $2,086), while the median weekly earnings for women who are lawyers went down (from $1,717 to $1,619).

You might remember what happened in 2016. On October 6, 2016, a tape came out in which Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested he could grab women’s genitals without obtaining consent or facing consequences. A month later, he was proven correct, when he won the election against the first major party female presidential candidate. Oof.

Did that inspire some women to drop out of more lucrative legal positions to pursue public interest work? Or did misogyny bubbling out into the open in the national discourse empower supervising attorneys to just let their unconscious biases take the wheel for a while?

There’s a little evidence for the latter. In a paper published in 2016 in the Academy of Management Journal, authors Forrest Briscoe and Aparna Joshi tracked internal personnel and billings data in a large law firm against publically available political donation records. They found that the political ideology among supervising law firm partners at the firm had a marked effect on the gender gap in performance-based pay among male and female subordinate lawyers. The male-female gender gap in performance-based pay was reduced among those working under liberal supervisors relative to those working under conservative supervisors. Also, the political ideology effect was more pronounced for workers with greater seniority within the firm. If you’re a woman working at a law firm, from the perspective of your pocketbook at least, you might tend to be better off working under a supervising attorney with liberal personal views.

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Using the data I have, I can only look at indirect correlations. I can’t directly connect the election of a person who regularly degrades women, or the drawn-out national shaming of a sexual assault victim, to the gender pay gap in the legal profession. But some of you can. If you changed your job and accepted a lower salary in order to combat antiquated biases in the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, or the Trump presidency in general, drop me a line. Better yet, share your story on social media. Ditto if you didn’t change jobs but felt the gender pay gap more profoundly in some other way in light of recent events. I’ll respect your anonymity, of course, if that is your preference.

And men, stand with me here. Whatever your feelings on Kavanaugh, you know your female colleagues shouldn’t be getting the short end of the stick financially. It’s not a zero-sum game. In 1898, William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody told a reporter for The Milwaukee Journal, “These fellows who prate about the women taking their places make me laugh… If a woman can do the same work that a man can do and do it just as well, she should have the same pay.” If you don’t have figured out what Buffalo Bill already knew in 1898, there’s a gentleman in Gopher Prairie who’d love to meet you.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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