Leaky pipeline for female lawyers

[astra_nomer]

The Boston Globe has an interesting article today about a study done by the MIT Workplace Center (yay, MIT!) the difficulties in retaining female lawyers until they make partner. While this isn't exactly about women in science, the parallels to retaining women in many professions are analogous.

Of the 1,000 Massachusetts lawyers who provided data for the report, 31 percent of female associates had left private practice entirely, compared with 18 percent of male associates. The gap widens among associates with children, to 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively -- reflecting the cultural reality that women remain the primary care givers of children and are therefore more likely to leave their firms for family reasons.

The dropout rate among women lawyers is overwhelmingly the result of the combination of demanding hours, inflexible schedules, lack of viable part-time options, emphasis on billable hours, and failure by law firms to recognize that female lawyers' career trajectories may alternate between work and family, the report found.

...

Nearly 40 percent of women lawyers with children have worked part time, compared with almost no men, even though men in the profession have more children than women, on average.

(Emphasis mine)

It seems like there's no getting around the fact that women are still expected to be the primary caregivers for children, regardless of our own career ambitions and no matter what lip service is paid to gender equality. And then employers choose not to make allowances for that and, in fact, often penalize women for demands for flexibility, hence fewer women at the upper echelons despite growing parity in numbers at entry levels.

This is why I don't believe any of the arguments about intrinsic differences between genders leading to differential career success. Social conditioning and institutional inflexibility have much more to do with it. In scientific terms, I would say that social, cultural, and institutional forces are first order effects, and intrinsic differences are second order. And any good scientist knows that dealing with lower order effects is more important.

Comments

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.

Here are some examples, replacing "father" with "man" and "mother" with "woman" from my own and my parents' experiences.

When Dad got his job at LSU, the university provided a "spouse relocation package" where they provided assistance in finding jobs for uprooted "spouses" (except they really only offered that benefit to couples where they hired the husband, so it was really a "wife relocation package"). They only provided help with finding part-time non-career track jobs, inplying that of course the wife of a university professor would leap at help finding some crummy temp work since she couldn't possibly have her own career to consider.

When I told my family I was moving to Virginia, many of my relatives asked me "but what about Mike?" Well, what about him? "He can't leave his company!" Umm, so I should remain unemployed? "Well yes. Why can't he support you until a job in Boston turns up?" Obviously neither Mike nor I are parents, but there is still a strong belief held by many people in this country (including a significant number of bosses, hiring managers, and executives) that a woman's job isn't as important as a man's career.

Or when Mike told his group that he wanted to move to Virginia with me and telecommute (not totally unheard of. His company has several employees who telecommute from various parts of the US and Canada), one of his coworkers said "Well, when I started working here, my wife quit her job and moved with me to a completely new country. Your girlfriend is just being selfish if she can't make the same sacrifices for you."

Part of my compensation package with Orbital is subsidized daycare should I ever need it. I learned from a guy I know who got an offer at the same time I did that his packages did not mention daycare at all, implying that of course women, and only women, are going to be thinking about the needs of their potential future children.

[lokiect.livejournal.com]

man, those are spectacular examples. ick!
your company didn't offer subsidized daycare to the guy? do you know if it's available and they just failed to mention it or they really didn't make it available to him? I mean, it's one thing if they're too dumb to say it because he's male anyways and another if they outright don't offer it.
I've had this rant in waiting (not always in waiting) about needing to fix the situation for men in order to get much further with equality. This just fits it so neatly... :(

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

I certainly hope it is available to guys who ask for it, (and I can't imagine that it would be legal to deny men who wanted the childcare subsidy based only on their gender), but I don't have any actual data.

Given that Orbital provides paid parental leave to both men and women, I assume that they didn't mention it in his summary of benefits because they assumed a guy his age just wouldn't care.

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

I certainly hope it is available to guys who ask for it, (and I can't imagine that it would be legal to deny men who wanted the childcare subsidy based only on their gender), but I don't have any actual data.

Given that Orbital provides paid parental leave to both men and women, I assume that they didn't mention it in his summary of benefits because they assumed a guy his age just wouldn't care.