Gender Gap Due, in Part, to 'Ambition Gap'?
Although Hillary Clinton is, perhaps, a rare exception, there is a reason why women are underrepresented in lawyer-laden political circles.
It’s because they don’t fight as hard as men do for political office, writes Ruth Marcus in a Washington Post column.
“There is a substantial gender gap in political ambition; men tend to have it, and women don’t,” says a recent Brookings Institution report (PDF) that Marcus cites.
Disproportionate family responsibilities and a “cockiness gap,” as Marcus describes it (men tend to have more confidence), also play a significant role in this discrepancy, the report found.
Does what Marcus terms an “ambition gap” between men and women in the political arena also help explain the disproportionately small number of female partners at law firms?
Women have no problem getting a foot in the door and working successfully at law firms initially for several years. But then they do not rise through the ranks to partner in the same numbers as their male counterparts. This is documented, for instance, in a recent study by a University of Iowa sociologist, although she is not the only one to have noted the phenomenon. Meanwhile, the reasons for discrepancy remain somewhat elusive.
“What we don’t know is whether the women intentionally steered themselves off the path to partnership, or whether someone blocked the road and pushed them off,” says sociologist Mary Noonan in a U of I press release about her study.
Analyzing data from University of Michigan law graduates of the 1970s and 1980s, she found that there was consistently a gap of roughly 20 percent between the number of men who made partner and the number of women who did. (The number of partners overall dropped during that time, too: A total of 54 percent of the women who graduated in the 1970s and spent five years or more at a law firm made partner, compared to 67 percent of the men. Among those who graduated in the 1980s, 40 percent of the women and 53 percent of the men became partners.)
Virtually all of the women reported that they had experienced gender-based discrimination from other lawyers or clients, according to Noonan.
Writes Marcus: “Sometimes the hardest glass ceilings are the ones women impose, whether knowingly or unconsciously, on ourselves.”
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Want More Women Partners? Then Name Them, Blogger Tells Firms”
