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 06:57 pm (UTC)Actually, this is exactly the direction being alert to the secondary issues of gender equality leads to in my workplace (in a technical field where women are still rare). People have observed that part time workers are more diligent with their time (since we bill hourly, this matters), than people who are just hanging around at work because they don't have lives (or lives they want to devote time to) outside of it.
The way to do it is to explicitly de-gender family-friendly policies. This has worked for my employer. I have several male coworkers who are the primary caregivers, by the definition of 'if the kid gets sick, the one that stays home from work and takes kid to the doctor is the primary caregiver', and it's not uncommon to hear in meetings 'It's 5pm. I must go /right now/ to get the kids from daycare.' from a man anymore.
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Date: 2007-05-02 07:01 pm (UTC)