Former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “Real change, lasting change, happens step by step.” That is why it is important that every person – men and women equally – participates in this fight for pay and gender equality in the workplace. The Law Society and the SRA are committed to reducing the gender wage gap. Tucker emphasizes the need for multiple parties within an organization to make changes and foster accountability in discovering and correcting wage gaps. The first group with the greatest impact is the HR function of an employer. HR managers should regularly review market rates of pay and know how their company handles retention rates. It may also make sense for HR to work with the company`s legal department on some of these processes. The ABA Gender Equity Working Group has identified 12 practices to promote gender equality in law firm compensation. The ABA`s recommendations focus on assessing, reporting, and addressing gender inequalities that impact compensation by developing formal and transparent processes to foster accountability and change. Recommended practices include systems to promote a fair and accurate allocation of settlement and origination credits, the development of a process to resolve allocation disputes, the application and monitoring of diversity within presentation teams, and the implementation of formal client succession protocols. These figures in the charts below are based on hourly rates during the monthly payment period ending April 25, 2021 and premiums paid during the year ending April 5, 2021.

The figures are compared to our 2019 and 2020 Gender Pay Gap Report. We can and must continue to gradually close the gender pay gap. History will thank us. Surveys of female lawyers have found that the widespread increase in domestic responsibilities and child care has not been offset by a reduction in workload, as expectations for productivity and billable hours remain unchanged. The untenable result is that for many working women, working from home is a 24/7 offer. So it`s no wonder that the pandemic has also resulted in an “observed increase in the gender gap in mental health.” In addition, the fact that many women simply cannot meet the competing demands of their jobs and families prompts experts to predict that the pandemic will “scare off a generation of working mothers” and reverse the limited gains in work and pay equality made in recent decades. Despite these anecdotal statements from women lawyers who invest fewer hours in their practice, “many years of data from the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) have shown that there are no significant differences between the hours recorded by lawyers at different levels and in different roles.” This applies to total billable and recorded hours. While we lack specific long-term data on reducing parenting hours within the legal profession, we do know that for all American women, reducing work hours, losing experience, and related decisions account for only one-third of the prison sentence. Regardless of role, sector and field of activity, gender pay gaps in legal jobs are still heavily affected by women, especially women of colour. Women are facing a new type of burnout, according to McKinsey`s 2021 Women in the Workplace report and Leanin.org.

Although more women have risen to leadership positions, they seem to be accepting extra work compared to their male counterparts – work for which they are often unpaid. In addition, women typically do more to support their team, lead diversity initiatives, lead company-wide equity initiatives, and be more likely to be allies for their colleagues in LGBTQ communities. While Table 1 for 2018 graduates does not show an overall wage gap in private practice, and the average salary of women exceeds that of men by about $750, it is worth considering whether differences are found when looking at the data by firm size. As can be seen in Table 3, in the largest 501+ firms, where wages for most jobs are known and publicly reported, it is not surprising that men and women have average wages of $190,000 and almost identical average wages. Median salaries in the 2018 class are also gender-equal in firms of 1 to 10 lawyers, 11 to 25 lawyers and 101 to 250 lawyers, although the relatively small gap between the average salaries of these firms favors men. Median salaries of recent law graduates in firms of 26 to 50 lawyers, 51 to 100 lawyers and 251 to 500 lawyers show gender differences of $2,000, $3,500 and $10,000, respectively, for 2018, with corresponding differences in average salaries. While it`s surprising to see this gap in company size of 251-500 for 2018, some of it can be explained by geographical differences. Men in law firms with 251 to 500 lawyers were more likely than women (30.8% versus 27.7%) to work in law firms in the Mid-Atlantic region, which tend to have the highest salaries, while women were more likely than men in the Centre-Northeast region (15.8% versus 13.1%), who tend to pay less. Specifically for New York City, where salaries of this company size are likely to be $190,000 for many graduates, 25.4 percent of men with a known location took a job in New York City, compared to 22.5 percent of women. These figures suggest that lawyers are not immune to the persistent and widespread phenomenon of the “gender pay gap”, or the difference between what women and men earn for equal work. Researchers offer various statistics and explanations of the wage gap, but one factor that companies and lawyers might pay more attention to is the rate at which women negotiate starting wages compared to their male counterparts. In addition, a number of practices can be implemented at the company, local and state level to close the gender pay gap at the wage negotiation stage: in fact, some companies have been accused of being a “black box” for remuneration.

Given that so many law firms provide legal advice to their own clients on pay equity, why this separation? Lawyers are not immune to the widespread gender pay gap.