Many female lawyers dropping off path to partnership
By Sacha Pfeiffer, Boston Globe Staff | May 2, 2007
For women, the law remains a frustrating profession.
Female lawyers continue to face intractable challenges in their attempts to become partners, causing them to abandon law firm careers -- and the legal profession entirely -- at a dramatically higher rate than men, according to a local study to be released today.
The study echoes the findings of other recent major reports, but offers more detailed statistics and demographic data. It also aims to draw attention to the social consequences of this troubling exodus: As fewer women ascend to leadership positions in their firms, the pool of women qualified to become judges, law professors, business chiefs , and law firm managers is shrinking.
"This shows that we are reaching a crisis point when it comes to the retention and advancement of women in the legal profession, and therefore a crisis point when it comes to women leaders generally," said Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a senior partner at the law firm Bowditch & Dewey and author of the book "Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women's Success in the Law."
For years, law firm leaders have insisted that as more women graduate from law school and enter private practice, the presence of women in leadership positions in the judiciary, in business, and in academia would grow correspondingly. But even though the gender gap in law firm hiring has been narrowing over the past decade, women are dropping off the partner track at alarming rates.
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.
The report, "Women Lawyers and Obstacles to Leadership," which was produced by the MIT Workplace Center in conjunction with several of the state's major bar associations, is rife with devastating commentaries on law firm life, including one female lawyer's remark that "I would not encourage my daughters to enter the legal profession."
Among its findings:
Women make up only 17 percent of law firm partners.
Women leave the partnership track in far greater numbers than men.
Women stop pursuing partnership mainly because of the difficulty of combining work and child care.
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.
Many firms have flextime policies but are "clever in discouraging their uses."
The impetus for today's report was a 2003 address to the Women's Bar Association by US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner, who called for urgent attention to the relative lack of women in leadership positions in the law. That spurred the creation of the Equality Commission, comprising representatives from the WBA, Women's Bar Foundation, Boston Bar Association, and Massachusetts Bar Association.
The commission's report surveyed the state's 100 largest firms about their attrition rates from 2002 to 2004, and also surveyed individual male and female lawyers about their movements in and out of firms from 2001 to 2005. About half the firms responded. Among individual lawyers, about 35 percent, or nearly 1,000, responded.
Of women who jump off partnership track, slightly more than half move to legal positions at nonprofit groups, government agencies, or corporations, where their schedules are often less grueling, according to the report. But 46 percent leave the law altogether, compared with less than a third of men who leave the partnership track.
Lawyers who step off the partnership track can often stay at firms in other capacities, including as so-called income partners. But the hours are often just as grinding, and income partners are essentially salaried employees, unlike "equity partners" whose earning potential is higher.
Practicing law also seems to force women to choose between working and having a family , the report said ; senior male lawyers are more likely than their female peers to be married or living with partners (99 percent vs. 84 percent, respectively) or to have children (80 percent vs. 68 percent).
Two other local studies in the past decade reached similar conclusions. In 1999, a Boston Bar Association report concluded: "We are in danger of seeing law firms evolve into institutions where only those who have no family responsibilities -- or, worse, are willing to abandon those responsibilities -- can thrive." In 2000, the Women's Bar Association released a report that found workplace flexibility was critical to women's success, but often elusive.
"The conclusions of all of these studies are very much the same," said Mona Harrington, program director of the MIT Workplace Center, "and that in itself is a story: Nothing is changing."
The ramifications of that failure to change extend well beyond law firm corridors, the study's backers warned. "If we don't reverse this trend, we will not only not have a greater representation of women on the bench and in academic institutions," said Pamela E. Berman, a recent past president of the Women's Bar Association, "but we'll actually see regression."
Sacha Pfeiffer can be reached at pfeiffer@globe.com.
