Motherhood Isn't the Culprit for Big Law's Gender Equity Failures
Enough with nuance and complicated explanations. In three words or less, tell me the reason women lag behind men in attaining equity partnership and status in Big Law. In my experience, men—almost always—blame “motherhood” or “work/life balance.” And women? They point the finger at “bro culture” or, simply, men. So while women are telling men that the culture overall needs fixing, men are saying biology is destiny. “The work is incredibly demanding, and it’s damn hard when you’re also a mom,” explains a male litigator about the dearth of female star trial lawyers. He adds, “And I have the utmost respect for mothers. It’s the coolest job in the world!” It’s nice he thinks being a mommy is cool, but that attitude isn’t helping women’s careers. The belief that women prioritize family more than men persists, as Catherine Tinsley and Robin Ely recently wrote in The Harvard Business Review, though “research simply does not support that notion.” The result is that women’s careers get stunted. “Mothers are often expected, indeed encouraged, to ratchet back at work,” reports HBR, and “are rerouted into less taxing roles and given less ‘demanding’ (read: lower-status, less career-enhancing) clients.” But isn’t it true that women with demanding careers and children have it extra hard? Don’t some women want alternatives to the partnership track? Absolutely. But women say the bigger problem is the male ethos of the workplace. “Men who think they are being sympathetic by lightening the load of pregnant women and new moms are doing them a huge disservice,” a Big Law female partner says. “It’s a myth that all women are so focused on their families that they are putting their careers in the back seat,” says a female senior in-house counsel. “Most women I know are not complaining about children. They are complaining about title, advancement and pay.” She adds, “I have full-time nannies and housekeepers around the clock. I don’t know where the vacuum cleaner is. I’ve racked up thousands of frequent-flyer miles because I go anywhere, anytime, for work. And I don’t feel guilty!” The focus on juggling home and family ignores systemic prejudices. “I have extraordinarily talented and productive female partners who have never married and have no kids and are not rewarded to the same extent as men with similarly-situated practices,” says the Am Law 100 partner. Entrenched beliefs about gender roles are as old as the hills, says Roberta Kaplan of Kaplan & Company. “It’s not isolated only to the legal profession,” she says. “For the same reasons that far too many men—and women—have a hard time seeing a woman as president, they have difficulty seeing women as running law firms, trial or deal teams.” Emphasizing differences between the sexes, warns the HBR article, results in “well-meaning but largely ineffectual interventions” focused on “‘fixing’ women or accommodating them”—which, I think, describes some of the Band-Aid programs at firms, like mommy career tracks, assertiveness training and work/life balance coaching. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that; it’s just that they largely miss the mark on curing gender inequity. The solution, of course, is complicated. The HBR article says institutions need “to fix the conditions that undermine women and reinforce gender stereotypes.” It advocates “questioning assumptions and proactively changing conditions” so that women have the opportunity to shine. All fine suggestions, but how many firms will start digging into their corporate soul to lift women? “Leadership fails them,” says Kirkland & Ellis partner Michael Williams. “Leadership needs to do more to recognize and invest in their trajectories.” In the meantime, stop telling women how daunting it must be to be both a lawyer and a mom. How much male sensitivity can a girl take? Contact Vivia Chen at vchen@alm.com.
