Leveling The Playing Field: How The Pandemic Removed Gender Barriers In The Legal Profession

I’m not the only one whose productivity went up when we all started working from home.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Lynsi Brantley back to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.

My prepandemic life as a full-time lawyer and mother was exhausting. Every morning I would wake up early, do my hair and makeup at top speed, rush around searching for clean outfits, pack lunches, and usher everyone out the door before 8 a.m. Then the actual work day started. I seriously considered the hours at the office my “rest time” before coming home to cook, clean up messes, and entertain my daughter until her bedtime.

Sound familiar? Pretty much every working mother I know had a similar daily routine. In 2019, the average woman spent 55 minutes getting herself ready for work, followed by an average commute time of nearly an hour every day. We would then spend about 2.4 hours on housework after we finished our paid work for the day. But then the pandemic took all our carefully structured routines and threw them out the window. 2020 found most of us sheltered in our homes, anxious and grieving over the chaos surrounding us.

Still, many working moms — but not all of them — found a silver lining in last year’s insanity: our daily routines balancing full-time work and full-time mothering became drastically simplified. Working from home meant that I spent exactly no time on my hair and makeup. I didn’t spend any time picking out clothes, either; most days I didn’t change out of my pajamas. I thought that having an infant at home while I worked would hurt my productivity, but it turned out to be the opposite. I got back a great deal of my time during the day just by not having to get us both ready in the mornings and not having to pump throughout the day. I could feed her while balancing my laptop on my knee, play with her while answering emails, and snuggle her while writing my briefs.

Interestingly, I’m not the only one whose productivity went up when we all started working from home. Across all industries, productivity rose by 13% during the pandemic. Despite employers’ fears, workers were able to fit more work into fewer hours when they worked from home. This shouldn’t have been surprising, since studies well before 2020 showed that remote workers consistently outperformed office workers on overall productivity. Remote workers also reported increased work satisfaction, which lowered attrition rates by an estimated 50% last year.

The exodus from brick-and-mortar workplaces was a boon for lawyer moms everywhere. Before 2020, when productivity was measured by the hours spent physically in the office, we found ourselves at a disadvantage. It didn’t matter how good the quality of our work was, because we had to take a long lunch to breastfeed a baby, cut short an afternoon meeting to take a child to a doctor appointment, or leave right at 5 p.m. to get to the daycare before they closed — all while our male colleagues kept on task. But remote work removed these barriers, allowing us to fit billable hours around our other commitments and giving us a rare opportunity to work on equal footing with men.

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While men may have put in more physical office time, that didn’t always translate to more billable time. In fact, the average lawyer’s daily billable time pre-COVID was only 2.3 hours. Whether your productivity was spread out over a 16-hour day or tightly squeezed in between daycare drop-off and soccer practice pickup, that number was pretty easy to hit (or exceed) for most lawyers. Unfortunately, women often missed out on the optics of staying late at the office or taking clients to happy hour, and were therefore seen as less productive. That’s all changing now that the hybrid workplace is becoming the new normal in the legal profession.

Remote work has also given women more opportunities for leadership. Companies that offer remote work have seen much higher percentages of women at the helm: just 5.2% of traditional brick-and-mortar companies have female CEOs, compared to 13% of fully remote companies and 19% of hybrid companies. In the legal profession, women-led firms pioneered flexible work arrangements well before COVID-19 forced all of us to work from home. Their initiatives didn’t end with remote work, either: firms like Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP created programs allowing reduced billables for attorneys coming off extended leave. They also created mentorship programs that offer mothers the support they need to get on the partnership track. Because of programs like this, studies are finding that women-led firms consistently bring in more female associates, and of those associates a larger number will stay on to become equity partners.

Still, while the past year of remote work might have given us some unexpected benefits, the pandemic overall was devastating to women in the legal profession. The 2020 recession was the first in modern history to cause more women to lose their jobs than men. Only about half of the women who lost their jobs have been able to return to work. Though the legal industry weathered the 2020 storm better than other fields, we still have a long way to go to gain back the ground we lost in creating a workplace with true gender equality. As we all return to a “normal” work environment, it is more important than ever to create a “normal” that supports and encourages the moms who are doing it all. Lawyer moms, keep fighting the good fight!


Lynsi Brantley is an Assistant District Attorney for Randall County in Canyon, Texas. She obtained her J.D. from Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and her bachelor’s degree in piano performance from West Texas A&M University. She and her husband are both avid musicians, and they enjoy playing violin and piano together in their spare time. Lynsi has a beautiful baby girl and a crazy rescue dog who both make sure to give her plenty of exercise while she is working from home. 

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