Women Criminal Defense Attorneys: Biased Billing Rates Persist for Female Lawyers

The ABA Journal recently featured a Wall Street Journal article entitled Female Lawyers Still Battle Gender Bias (subscription required), highlighting statistics which indicate that women lawyers still face a gender crisis in the legal profession.  The Wall Street Journal reported the alarming findings of a study which concludes that billing rates of female lawyers lag behind those of male lawyers.  For female law partners, these billing rates are about 10% less on average than their male partner counterparts.  As an example, in New York, partners of 1000 plus lawyer firms with similar levels of experience representing investment banks were analyzed, and there was as much as a 25% billing rate discrepancy between female partners and their male counterparts. Not surprisingly, these discrepancies apply to associates as well.

The cause of this imbalance is complex.  University of California at Hastings law professor Joan Williams discussed the contributing nature of the way that firms evaluate lawyers and award origination credit, “It’s all a series of backroom assessments and backroom deals,” Williams told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s just like a petri dish for gender bias.” Williams surveyed 700 law partners in 2009 who were mostly female and found that four of five reported not getting their fair share of origination credit. Employment lawyer Patricia Gillette of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe discussed that fact that at some firms big clients tend to get handed down to male, rather than female, lawyers. Andrea Kramer, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery LLP, discussed how women lawyers tend to be asked more often to take on administrative and non-billable “housekeeping” tasks that help law firms run smoothly, but do little to boost individual pay or internal prestige.

These statistics are very troubling to me. Although they are not surprising given the obstacles that women face in this industry, the evidence seems to be piling up.  I have to wonder how many more statistics need to be reported for women in our profession to take a stand, in unity, to change this story.  We have all heard other women talking about how “only the truly tough amongst us survive”, or sharing war stories of how women before us fought their way into the boys club, and therefore suggesting that all women should be expected to endure that same struggle without complaint.  But I refuse to accept the argument that these pay discrepancies reflect only the “weak” amongst us.  I think they demonstrate a much more insidious problem, that all of us, especially the strongest amongst us, need to commit to changing.