OPEN UNIVERSITY OCTOBER 23, 2007
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A report from a group of law students called "Building a Better Legal Profession" showed up in my e-mailbox the other day. The students did a survey of the big law firms to see how they measured up on a variety of diversity issues -- women partners, minority partners, etc. Since law firm hiring is a market, why shouldn't female and minority students at least know what they were buying into?
What interested me the most is their retention rate survey, in which they compared the percentage of women associates with the percentage women or minorities who made partner. I used this technique in one of my books, "A Woman's Guide to Law School" (Penguin 1999), comparing the percentage of women in the relevant classes to the percentage who made Law Review and Coif to generate a rough ranking of law schools where women succeed.
Turns out big law firms, like law schools, which seem so much alike, are actually somewhat different in the rate at which, for example, women succeed. The firm Jones, Day, where women succeed at the greatest rate has a 52% female retention rate. 43% of their associates are women and 22% of the partners are. The lowest ranking Fulbright and Jaworski retains 12% of women to partner: 55% associates are women, but only 7% partners.
Even after my last couple of years laboring in the Opt Out "Revolution" I was saddened to see how few women make it into the well-paid and powerful ranks of partners in big national law firms at all. When I called the diversity coordinator for the "best" firm, Jones, Day, she refused to comment on placement in or out but turned me on to a report from the Massachusetts Bar Association and MIT. The report described the process as one where women leave firms before the partnership decision at almost twice the rate as men do and among the leavers of both genders women go to non-firm alternative jobs at even greater rates than that. So at the end of the process, the numbers are as the Stanford students reported them.
Well, knowledge is power as they say. So I am wondering what the more than 50% female members of today's law school classes are thinking about the Stanford students' findings.
--Linda Hirshman
7 comments
And just where are the women law grads going? Is that not also an important question? Or--in glorious legal fashion--do only the "big firms" "count"? The "big, national" firms of which you speak offer a crushingly patriarchal career structure. No wonder that many of the women in my law school class (and me, for that matter) choose smaller or medium size firms that offer a more sane (i.e. less than 2200 b.h.) path to firm partnership. Or, more importantly, many of them choose public interest. They're the ones doing the important legal work in this society, contra Cravath et al.
- ryanmacd
October 23, 2007 at 9:56pm
"So I am wondering what the more than 50% female members of today's law school classes are thinking about the Stanford students' findings. "
Quite possibly "Wow--looks like the woman at Fulbright and Jaworski have the inside scoop on great husbands. I better take their offer more seriously."
- jmkerr
October 24, 2007 at 4:20pm
The MIT study shows them going to be house counsel,( although this is odd, since the percentage of women chief house counsel has not gone up enormously), to government, public interest jobs or out of law altogether. MIT says 6% of them opt out to stay home. I don't know what a crushingly patriarchal career structure is, but there has been something of a speedup at the top of the American job structure, and men are participating in it at much greater hours and rates than similarly educated women are. So if that's patriarchal, if their wives are doing more of the household labor, as other surveys show, then they are enabling the guys to be patriarchal, no?
- LRHirshman
October 24, 2007 at 5:37pm
I offer this bit of family history for what light it might shed on these issues from a Canadian perspective.
My daughter about 5 years ago graduated from an excellent Canadian law school—same one I went to, too many years ago—with a whole slew of As. She was originally on the big firm track, getting a summer job with one of them after her first year of school because of her good marks. She did not like the big firm ethos right from the start and took herself off that track. She got a job with the Federal Department of Justice, which to me sounds like a dream employer. For an example, she has two children, and is in the last ¼ of her second year long maternity leave at a high percentage of her paid salary. All of her friends, men and women, hired at big firms, she tells me have left them for saner legal pastures, looking for better balances between law and life.
I originally championed and tried to argue for the possibility of her seeking big firm employment and my daughter wisely disregarded my solicitations. I think now she made the right choice. That conclusion is reinforced by both the experience of her friends, some of whom I have spoken to, and stories I hear from young lawyers that I meet such as entire hired cohorts after a few years leaving the big Canadian firm that hired them for more comfortable situations, however less green.
There have been massive changes in the legal culture I have observed and experienced over the 30 years I have been a lawyer. A few of them are: the sheer number of women in the profession, as now more than ½ the places in Canadian law schools are taken by women; the relative indifference with which greatly talented young lawyers, men and women, behold the big firms; and the greater geniality and reasonableness of the judges I appear before, more and more of them being women. (In our Supreme Court, 4 of the 9 judges are women, including the Chief Justice.)
- basman
October 24, 2007 at 9:24pm
basman - in your experience are female judges superior to male ones? More fair, logical, balanced?
Just curious as to whether law as a profession will someday end up dominated by women.
- teplukhin2you
October 25, 2007 at 6:32pm
Can't so generalize, but they are part of this generation's generally more civilized judges who are respectful of counsel compared to the curmudgeons I used to plead before about 30 years ago.
- basman
October 26, 2007 at 9:48am
Testing
Testing
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Testing
- jet
October 31, 2007 at 2:28am