March 19, 2006

Obviously Second Rate Women

Then Lott got my Whaaaa?: "A second obvious problem is that law schools might have let in lower quality women then [sic] men in order to get the admission rates so high for women." Lott doesn't mention whether this implies that before we had gender parity, the women admitted to law school were much higher quality than the men, but I can't say that this explanation is one that came to my mind unaided. The greyhaired partner cohort compared to the recent law school classes can be fairly called apples and oranges; the legal abilities of male law students compared to that of female students seems much less disparate.

On the other hand, is there a good way to compare the achievement of recent male and female law graduates? The upcoming Supreme Court clerkship class would seem to uphold Lott's belief, as Ginsburg and Breyer are the only justices with two male and two female clerks. Souter, Scalia and Thomas hired only men; Kennedy, Stevens, Roberts and Alito each hired one woman. O’Connor, retired and therefore entitled to one clerk, kept a woman. But this has its own selection bias due to the relative shortage of women with the ideological biases that the non-liberal justices might prefer.

The NYT article holds up as a model the life of Proskauer partner Bettina B. Plevan, who claims that her husband split the domestic work of childrearing and chores with her, and reaffirms this explicitly with a quote from another woman, who started a firm with her husband, on how to solve the problem: "One thing we need is a sense of shared responsibilities for the household and, most importantly, shared responsibilities for taking care of the kids." AK wishes there had been more on this topic, but the difficulty of having gender equality in the workplace without having it in family life is a tale more than twice-told. Jeremy Blachman sees the women who don't want to fall in line with what law firms demand as perhaps having the right idea.

An anonymous blogger expands upon Jennifer L. Bluestein's (Baker & McKenzie) remark, "Women are less likely to get the attention than men. Some of this is left over from the sexual harassment cases from the 90's, but I think that it's more because of the fact that we don't look like men," by declaring the need to "hit [men] over the head with their passive discriminatory ways." Her particular method struck me as slightly passive aggressive, with its hint of a claim that her employer was violating the law and its failure to state the existence (exclusion, lower pay) rather than effect (only one female employee) of such discrimination.

Anupam Chander sees the possibility of discrimination as well -- "Remarkably absent from the story is discrimination based on the partners' perceptions of relative ability" -- but also says, "it is difficult to hazard a clear explanation in these matters." Regardless of one's view about whether a lack of female partners is a problem, I suspect most people who have interacted with law firms would agree with this generalized complaint: "Law firms like to talk about running the firm like a business and looking at the numbers, but they're running on an institutional model that's about 200 years old. Most law firms do a horrible job of managing their personnel, in terms of training them and communicating with them."