Attorney at Law Magazine is a national B2B professional journal for and about lawyers in private practice. The magazine focuses on the industry, its events, events, as well as the professionals and companies that contribute to its success. The editorial is a collaboration of interviews with professionals, columns from industry experts and articles on advancing your legal practice through marketing, practice management and client service. We can and must continue to gradually close the gender pay gap. History will thank us. If initial salary negotiations play a central role in the gender pay gap among lawyers, what can law firms and young lawyers do about it? Companies could level the playing field to make wages non-negotiable. Hiring partners should also be aware of this inequality in wage negotiations and recognize unconscious biases that could lead them to punish women more than men in wage negotiations. Even a boring and buzzing compensation review season is supreme brutality in a law firm. What are we waiting for for the next law firm examination season? It will be anything but routine. Although women have made significant progress in the legal profession, women lawyers continue to earn far less than lawyers.
Based on survey data from a large sample of full-time lawyers in Texas, we find a gender pay gap of thirty-five thousand dollars in the median that cannot be explained by differences in human capital or occupational segregation. We also provide evidence that the legal market particularly disadvantages women who excel in law schools. While high academic performance significantly increases lawyers` income, it does not have the same effect on women`s incomes. High-performing female lawyers earn less than high-performing female lawyers in all practice settings and earn less than their lower-performing male counterparts in private practice. We conclude that discrimination in the legal profession results in part from the devaluation of women`s human capital, so that the excellent academic qualifications and other qualities valued by men are much less appreciated by women. N°2: More transparency around remuneration. A 2013 report by the American Bar Association recommended that companies put all factors on which compensation decisions are made in writing and communicate them to all partners. This would encourage compensation committees to adhere to the stated principles and allow partners to understand how compensation decisions are made. So what explains wage inequality? Research shows that a number of factors contribute to the gender pay gap in the law.
One thing is clear from the data: women lawyers are not paid less than their male partners because they work fewer hours or do inferior work. In fact, studies consistently show that women work more efficiently (fewer hours than men charge for certain tasks) and that women`s average annual billable annual working time exceeds that of their male counterparts. The whirlwind of the law firm`s «wage war» means that compensation issues will have an outsized impact. There`s also a call for unprecedented pay transparency, with many companies willing to tell the world exactly what their lawyers are doing. «Why do female partners have such a low percentage as men?» asked Lowe in the Law.com interview. «Is it still the network of old boys, and women are directed to inferior work? As a lawyer`s husband, we had very different experiences in the early years, and there are so many systemic gender issues that come into this work. In the wake of the U.S. women`s soccer team`s dominant World Cup this summer and their sex-discrimination lawsuit against American football, the gender pay gap has returned in the news — raising the question of whether such wage gaps exist for new law graduates. According to statistics from ABA`s 2019 publication A Current Glance at Women in the Law, female lawyers` weekly salaries were 80% of men`s salaries in 2018, and male partners received 27% more than female partners. While we know that wage gaps between employment industries tend to be smaller when men and women are in the early stages of their careers, and widen significantly over time, it is always useful to look at where pay gaps may exist early on and whether this has changed over time. Law firms may not consider how good they are when it comes to having many tools needed to explain why lawyers get paid, what they get paid for. And they know the law.
So why does the wage gap persist in law firms? Lawyers are not immune to the widespread phenomenon of the gender pay gap. Law firms have the foundation to be leaders in pay equity. Many companies have lockstep or semi-lockstep compensation systems. Although it has some drawbacks, these systems have the advantage of reducing the wage gap. This level field advantage can be transferred to partner roles. Surveys of female lawyers have revealed that the across-the-board increase in domestic responsibilities and child care has not been offset by a reduction in workload, as expectations for productivity and billable hours remain unchanged. The untenable result is that for many working women, working from home is a 24/7 offering. No wonder, then, that the pandemic has also led to an «observed increase in the gender gap in mental health.» Moreover, the fact that many women simply cannot meet the competing demands of their jobs and families has led experts to predict that the pandemic will «scare off a generation of working mothers» and reverse the limited gains in professional and pay equality made in recent decades.