Leaky pipeline for female lawyers
May. 2nd, 2007 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
astra_nomerThe 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.
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.
(Emphasis mine)
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.
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.
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Date: 2007-05-02 04:35 pm (UTC)Nrrr..... this is setting off red flags for me, because my instant response is to dive into semantics of "what is a real career", and I think diverting into semantics is a big warning sign that I'm missing something.
If I had said that bit that you quoted from
A "real career" is anything the woman thinks is a real career. For example, my mother worked as a tax preparer part time for years in order to supplement Dad's income. She hated it, so even though her manager had made a very successful and fulfilling career of running this personal accounting firm, it was not a career for Mom. After my sisters and I were grown she got an MBA (which is what she really wanted to do all along) and started work as a financial planner. She will never be a district director or even a branch manager, but she finds it fulfilling and thinks of it as her career. Or to use Lokie's example of a bakery worker, I wouldn't say someone who is working in a bakery because they are bored and feel unable to do something more interesting fulltime had a career. On the other hand, someone who works in a bakery because they love to bake, love to provide delicious treats to the neighborhood clientele, and are passionate about being the best baker around? That's a career, even if they are "only" working part time.
If we set up society so that the only women who reproduce are women who are willing to sacrifice things that are important to them, for no other reason than that they are female, then we have guaranteed that the next generation of children will be raised by women who believe that women's needs aren't as important as men's. I, personally, find this horrifying.
I also think that it is enormously unhealthy for a grown adult to spend their whole day around children immersed in their children's world. It's been my observation at church that women who are stay-at-home-moms and do not pursue any other interests or hobbies outside of their widdle pweciouses are the most emotionally stunted, clingy, helpless, uninteresting people I've ever met. (Not that I think all SAHMs are like that! I know several who actively pursue hobbies or volunteer work who get regular adult socialization who are perfectly reasonable people).