Women are still a small minority of partners in major US law firms, according to data released this week by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, even though they represent four of every 10 US lawyers and half of law school graduates.
There are, on average, about 13 women partners at US law firms, compared with 63 white men who are partners, a position that commands the top salaries and sometimes an ownership position and rights to a share of the firm's profits.
Women have difficulty juggling family with the requirement that associates work 60- to 80-hour weeks to make partner. But lawyers and academics who study women in the legal profession say many women also hit a glass ceiling in firms run by male partners.
"Unfortunately, discrimination remains alive with respect to women in the legal workplace," said Lauren Stiller Rikleen, senior partner at Bowditch & Dewey in Framingham. Stiller Rikleen, who formed a Boston Bar Association task force to study work-family issues in the legal profession, researches women's issues related to advancement in the law.
"It's much more subtle than it used to be, but it is still a barrier," she said. Female associates do not have the same access as male associates to mentors, to high-profile or high-end projects or cases, or to business development opportunities inside the firm, she said.
Women and men start out on an equal footing, however. Both start out at law firms in equal numbers: US law firms have, on average, 38 white male associates and 38 female associates, the commission reported.
Minorities have had even less success than women in making partner at US firms: There is just one African-American partner, on average, at a firm, one Latino, and one Asian partner, according to the data.
Since the EEOC's forms do not require firms to list partnership numbers, the agency derived its partnership figures by sampling firms and by analyzing a combination of data sources.
Over the past 30 years, women moved into the legal profession in huge numbers, much as they have into the labor force. In 1975, women were only 14 percent of all legal professionals at medium-size and large firms. By 1992, that number had risen to 37 percent. Women made little progress in the ensuing decade: they were 40 percent of legal professionals in 2002, a gain of just 3 percentage points.
Legal professionals were defined, primarily, as attorneys but included other professionals such as accountants or lobbyists; paralegals were not included. The report reviewed annual filings to the federal anti-discrimination agency by 1,200 law firms with 100 or more attorneys.
"There was a lot of easy progress between '75 and '86 and then some of the structural issues kicked in that made it more difficult for women to make much more progress in the workplace," said Joan Williams, law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and director of its Program on Gender, Work and Family.
Critics say firms have been unwilling or unable to make a variety of organizational changes that would produce greater numbers of women lawyers, a goal many say they are trying to achieve.
Williams said since most women become mothers and most mothers work fewer than 50 hours a week, it is inevitable that they would face challenges in the demanding legal profession. But women who become lawyers and ask to work a normal week face stigmas within the firm, "career stall," and "schedule creep" -- a gradual rise in their hours.
Women who work 40-hour weeks "are seen as being only part-timers and may be not committed, not serious -- and they're working what's viewed as full-time in many industries," she said. "If the only way you can be a partner is to work 2,300 hours a year, you will have few women and very few mothers as law firm partners."
Noting that US Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could not find work at a law firm upon graduating from Columbia Law School in 1959, Stiller Rikleen said "those days are long past."
"Women are coming out of law school and getting hired in large numbers. The problem is what happens when they get into the firms and how the opportunities for women are not the same as men."
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