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

[narya.livejournal.com]

Benazeer said a lot of things very well, but I also wanted to respond to this.

If I want to be ultracompetitive, then I'm going to want to work with other people who are similarly ultracompetitive.

What does ultracompetitive mean to you? You want to work with people who are on the corporate fast track? You want to win a Nobel prize? You want to be on a team that creates a successful product? You want to work with people who are smart, talented, and motivated?

I believe that only the first of these is really indicated by the number of hours you put in, and that's because evaluations in the corporate world are often more strongly tied to the corporate culture than to getting results.

If you're trying to win a nobel prize, who do you want to work with? If you're given the choice of being in lab 35 hours a week with somebody who's the smartest person out there or 60 hours a week with somebody who can be there more but isn't quite as brilliant, which option do you think is a path to the Nobel prize for you?

Or, if you want to be on a team that creates a successful product, who do you want as your coworkers? If you interviewed a potential coworker you thought was really good but needed to work 7am-4pm due to family commitments, whose loss do you think it is if the company requires everyone to be there 9-5?

I believe also that it's fundamentally bad for society if only women without real careers can reproduce.

You're right that this was probably phrased poorly. What if it were phrased as "I believe it's fundamentally bad for society if women who are surgeons, lawyers, and tenure track faculty can't reproduce"? Those are three of the careers I can think of offhand where having kids is very problematic but the people doing the career are clearly (to me at least) contributing in some way to society.

[dcltdw]

If you're trying to win a nobel prize, who do you want to work with? If you're given the choice of being in lab 35 hours a week with somebody who's the smartest person out there or 60 hours a week with somebody who can be there more but isn't quite as brilliant, which option do you think is a path to the Nobel prize for you?

Neither.

I want to work 60 hours a week with the smartest person out there.

Actually, step one would be tossing me from the team, as I do not have the focus to be ultracompetitive about anything. (That's not supposed to be a value judgement, although I will smugly and snarkily note that I am okay with that assessment.)

whose loss do you think it is if the company requires everyone to be there 9-5?

Working 9-5 fails to be ultracompetitive.

Now, just to clear the air: do I think it'd be possible to have a company beat the crap out of (say) Google by only working 9-5? Sure. Likely? Not at all. It's much more likely they'll beat Google by working 8-6 in addition to all the other gazillion factors that would be required to beat Google.

[narya.livejournal.com]

I want to work 60 hours a week with the smartest person out there.

Ah, but the point is that isn't possible. There's a 50% chance that person is female. If that person is female, there's a significant chance she already made the choice between 60 hours a week in lab or having a family. There's a significant chance that she chose family and that she's no longer able to get back into research. There's a significant chance you're going to be working with the less brilliant person, even once the more brilliant person's kids are in college and she'd have the 60 hours a week to devote to research. If there had been a middle ground in the first place, I think everyone would have been better off.

[dcltdw]

Good point.

I think there's a nitpicky path in here about "if I want to be ultracompetitive, I can't wait for Ms X's kids to be out of college", but I don't think that detracts from your main point.

[narya.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's hard to see it as a loss to you when you look at all the young people who are just now making the decision of staying or not. But I think there are plenty of Ms X's out there who are now 48 and just shipped their kids off to college whose contributions we're potentially missing out on now.