Abstract
The fight for women’s equality in law has achieved a lot. Women have
made up nearly half of law students and law firm associates for the last two
decades. Despite this progress, the partnership ranks of law firms are
profoundly and intolerably sex segregated and will remain so for the
foreseeable future. Our profession, which has fought for and helped to achieve
legal equality on behalf of so many, is itself dogged by intractable inequality.
A standard set of solutions, which address structural barriers within law firms
and the effects of cognitive biases, have been urged for decades and yet have
failed to deliver any significant improvement.
A persistent feedback loop lies at the heart of this intractable gender
inequality in law firm leadership and impedes women’s progress to
partnership. Gender stereotypical expectations and senses of obligation lead
to differences between men and women with respect to their work experience
and income, which, in turn, lead to couples making rational, income
maximizing (and gender stereotyped) decisions about parenting and managing
the home, which reinforce gender stereotypes. Both men and women are caught
in this feedback loop. Continuing to focus on fixing law firms so that they are
more equal for women cannot disrupt this feedback loop because it ignores the
other half of the population—men—who are stuck in the loop.
The breadwinner stereotype is the culprit behind men’s part of the feedback
loop. Women’s equality requires it to be dismantled. Persuading men to take
paternity leaves of a month or two by themselves with their new babies has
eroded the breadwinner stereotype in countries as hard working as, and even
more socially conservative than, ours. Many law firms already offer fully paid
paternity leaves of over a month, but few men take enough of it to make a real
difference. Paternity leaves need to be carefully designed to exploit rather than
buck the breadwinner stereotype. The tweaks to existing paternity leave
policies are relatively small but will require the commitment of leaders in law
firms to make such policies successful. The proposal offered here is not a silver
bullet that will bring down gender inequality. It is, however, likely to help a
lot, improve the lives of men, their children, and their spouses, and hurt no one.
Repository Citation
Miranda McGowan,
The Parent Trap: Equality, Sex, and Partnership in the Modern Law Firm,
102 Marq. L. Rev. 1195
(2019).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/mulr/vol102/iss4/7
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