Lawyers are another well-studied group of professionals. Noonan et al (2005) found that female lawyers tended to earn less than male lawyers, but worked fewer hours, and had fewer years in private practice. In the UK, Wass and McNabb (2006) suggested that the longer hours worked by male lawyers give them a chance to do more "non-chargeable work" -- a type of experience highly valued in promotion prospects. Wass and McNabb cite Crompton and Sanderson's Gendered Jobs and Social Change (1990) in pointing out that earnings inequality is higher in professional careers than in employment in general.
This is another paragraph I cut out of the post on self-employment pay rates (4/8/09). I found it especially interesting that the earnings inequality increases with education, rather than decreases, especially considering the fact that women are overtaking men in college graduation rates. Maybe it's just that there is a wider range of earnings within professional careers, but it struck me as counterintuitive.
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2 comments:
Haven't read the studies but I have a couple of comments:
1) At large firms (a minority of lawyers, but a majority of highly paid lawyers) base compensation for junior attorneys is generally lockstep based on years of practice only and bonuses are either lockstep or based almost entirely on hours billed. There is almost no room for gender discrimination.
2) At large firms, compensation of senior attorneys are generally based on contribution to the bottom line -- hours billed, client hours/$ brought to the firm, client hours for "responsible attorney" matters (don't ask), etc.
3) Make sure the studies you read look to *lawyer* compensation, not compensation for people working in the legal field. Secretaries are not paid as much as paralegals, who are not paid as much as lawyers. The vast majority of secretaries are women; in my experience, a small majority of paralegals are women.
4) In solo practices or very very small firms (the majority of lawyers), an attorney of course sets his/her own pay.
5) I know several part time attorneys -- all of them are women.
6) Regarding "non-chargeable work", you either bring in clients or you don't. If you write 1,000 articles and present at 500 conferences but only bring in $100,000 in business, you aren't going to get "promoted" nearly as fast as the lawyer who brings in $500,000 because he was college roommates with Raytheon's general counsel.
ukelele
2009-04-21 05:20 pm UTC
found it especially interesting that the earnings inequality increases with education, rather than decreasesI think you're right that what's going on here is that highly-educated people have a much wider range of job prospects (hence earnings potential), and, for whatever reason, women and men tend to be in different parts of that range. (I mean, how much earnings inequality can you really have without education -- where are the high-paying unskilled jobs?)
Law in particular seems like a place where (even compared to other professions) there are very different *kinds* of work, and those kinds come with very different pay scales (public defender, independent private practice, large firms, judgeships, professorships...). I can imagine there being a range of gendered choices (both voluntary and coerced) going on there, though of course I can't say which account for the phenomenon.
(In other words, I think the interesting phenomenon here is not level of education but, as usual for this blog, gender.)
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