Gender differences and big law.

Interesting paper on who succeeds in big law by Ghazala Azmat (Queen Mary University of London, Centre for Economic Performance, Centre for Economic Policy Research, and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and Rosa Ferrer (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and Centre for Economic Policy Research). The abstract:

This paper documents the gender gap in performance among high-skilled professionals in the United States. On the basis of widely used performance measures in law firms, we find that male lawyers bill 10 percent more hours and bring in more than twice as much new client revenue as female lawyers. The differential impact across genders in the presence of young children and differences in aspirations to become a law firm partner account for a large share of the difference in performance. We show that accounting for performance has important consequences for gender gaps in lawyers’ earnings and subsequent promotion.

 

 

From a summary of the article:

 

Even among high-skilled professionals, there remain big differences between men and women in their earnings and career progression. These gender gaps among career-minded men and women have become the focus of growing public debate about why they arise and persist – see, for example, the long-running dispute between Sheryl Sandberg (2009, 2013) and Anne-Marie Slaughter (2012, 2015).

Given that there are gender gaps in career outcomes even for individuals with similar educational background and training, to what extent are they attributable to differences in measured performance? Does family responsibility play a role in performance? Or are other factors responsible for differences?

To shed light on these questions, our research relates measures of hours worked and performance to the labour market outcomes of lawyers. The legal profession provides an ideal framework for this purpose. As in other high-skill professions and industries, there is persistent earnings gap among male and female lawyers (see, for example, Bertrand and Hallock, 2001; Manning and Swaffield, 2008; and Bertrand et al, 2010). Even as male-dominated cohorts of lawyers have retired, the gap has not decreased over the last decade (see Figure 1).