I recently finished drafting a report for the San Diego Lawyers Club Balance Campaign. Lawyers Club is essentially San Diego's women's bar association, and its Campaign is based on efforts by similar entities in other cities to encourage legal employers to adopt and support workplace policies designed to allow lawyers to balance more successfully their work and outside commitments. Perhaps the most noteworthy such effort to date has been the San Francisco Bar's No Glass Ceiling initiative, pursuant to which 76 law firms agreed to specific employment targets within a given time frame (e.g., 25% women partners by January 1, 2005). The San Diego Campaign does not involve such specific targets, but rather asks legal employers to commit to the principle of balanced lives for their lawyers, and to consider a variety of specific policies designed to help to achieve that goal. The report itself breaks no new ground, but rather summarizes the work of leading writers in this area, including Joan Williams, Cynthia Calvert, Deborah Rhode, and Cynthia Fuchs Epstein. A version of the report will be published in the Thomas Jefferson Law Review later this summer.
No sooner had I finished patting myself on the back for a service project well done, than I came across a thought provoking and well argued new article by Michael Selmi and Naomi Cahn, Women in the Workplace: Which Women, Which Agenda?, 13 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol'y 7 (2006)) (available on SSRN too). Selmi and Cahn contend that while too much work and too little time for family may be real problems for professional women such as lawyers, for non-professionals, who make up the vast majority women workers, the problem isn't too much work, but rather too little work, or at least too little income. The higher incomes earned by professional women give them options to "contract out" or pay for domestic services such as child care or prepared meals, while other women workers lack these options. For this reason, most women workers are unlikely to be able to benefit much from proposed solutions to work/family conflict that have been endorsed by most writers on the subject (including myself) such as part-time work, flex-time, telecommuting, and job-sharing, all of which involve trading income for less work. Rather, Selmi and Cahn suggest a number of measures, including longer school days, publicly supported daycare, efforts to reduce domestic violence, and changed attitudes (pursuant to which men will perform a greater share of domestic work) that are much more likely to benefit far greater numbers of women workers than the above-mentioned policies.
In the end, I don't think Selmi and Cahn's arguments suggest that women and men lawyers should abandon efforts to get legal employers to be more accommodating and supportive with regard to balance issues. They do suggest, however, that when we focus on balance issues in the legal practice setting, we are only looking at a small piece of what is admittedly a much larger issue.