Convictions : billable hours

Not Just Women's Work

Doug Kmiec — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:05:00 GMT

A new study says women with children are less "productive" at work. Maybe it's time law firms and corporations -- and men -- restructure employment relationships to recognize that many women want to be both parent and professional, and the culture would be better off if we made that easier to do. ...(read more)

Law Firm Work and Family-Friendly Policies

Eric Posner — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:21:00 GMT

The study mentioned by Emily can be found here (though you might have to pay to see it). Several of its conclusions are puzzling.

1. "[C]hildless women may be more productive than women with children and their male colleagues (with or without children)." Childless women billed almost 1600 hours, while fathers billed 1541 hours, childless men billed 1491 hours, and mothers billed 1387 hours.

However, the data also show that childless women are less experienced, with an average of 7.13 years of legal experience, compared to 15.3 for fathers, 13.44 for childless men, and 11.06 for mothers. You should picture these firms as employing young childless women, and older men, and older women with children. Are the childless women billing more just because they are younger, that is, your average overworked associate competing for partnership? (In the regressions, the authors control for legal experience, but if mothers tend to be partners, childless women tend to be associates, and partners work less than associates, I don't think that their legal experience control will do the trick.)

2. "[F]amily-friendly benefits appear more advantageous to men than women, even though women with young children would likely gain more from them in balancing work and family." The three variables that measure family-friendly benefits do not actually refer to specific programs such as paid maternity leave; they refer to survey respondents' perceptions of family-friendliness (including such things as whether people at work frown on discussions about child care). The study finds that being in a family-friendly firm does not increase a woman's productivity, but reduces a man's productivity.

The first result is more surprising than the second. To see why, note that one of the measures of family-friendliness is "reasonable workload." It is straightforward that if you are in a firm with a "reasonable workload" you are going to bill fewer hours. The two variables—billable hours and reasonable workload—ought to measure the same thing. So why the different results for women? The only thing I can think of is that maybe women are given more tasks that are not billable, perhaps because they have less legal experience, and it is those tasks that they forgo if they have children while in a family-friendly firm. The authors note that billable hours account for only 2/3 of the time spent by the lawyers at work, so if non-billable hours decline, this will not show up in the regressions and yet may account for a great deal of the underling variation.

But the larger point is that we can't say whether these benefits are more "advantageous" to men or to women without knowing more about how employees are compensated. People don't care only about how many hours they work; they also care about pay. But pay is not in the data set. This leads to a third concern.

3. "[W]e found very little support for ... the costs of working in a family-friendly firm for women's productivity." Emily interprets this statement as follows. "The happy spin from the authors is that the family-friendly policies aren't hurting the firms vis-à-vis their women employees, which makes the policies seem less costly. (Their original hypothesis was that the family-friendly firms would find that mothers were less productive, since these policies are often seen as the path to mommy tracking.)"

Assuming Emily's interpretation is correct (I'm not sure I understand the statement I quoted from the paper), the paper doesn't really provide much support for this idea, or have any normative implications, as far as I can tell. Some firms have family-friendly policies and other firms do not. Women work about the same amount in both firms. But it may be they are paid less in the family-friendly firms, which would suggest that they are being less productive (producing lower-quality work, or producing less work given a fixed investment of the firm's other resources). Or they could be equally productive but receiving some of their compensation in the form of flexibility rather than cash. We just don't know because the study doesn't include salary data or other information (such as the quality of the work) we would need to measure productivity. Also the omitted non-billable hours are troubling.

Law Firm Work: Less Is More

Emily Bazelon — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:43:00 GMT

When law firms institute family-friendly policies (flex hours, reasonable work loads), who benefits? That depends how you measure it. Mothers at these firms are neither more nor less productive than mothers at other firms, as measured by billable hours, according to a new study of 670 lawyers in Alberta, Canada, by sociologists Jean Wallace and Marisa Young. But fathers at family-friendly firms are less productive than fathers at old-style firms. At the same time, fathers with help at home, like stay-at-home wives and weekly cleaning services, increase their productivity at work, whereas women with stay-at-home husbands and cleaning aren't more productive.

What's going on here? Wallace and Young argue that fathers tend to consider breadwinning an all-important family contribution, so when they have more help at home, they respond by working harder. Also, men are far more likely to have a stay-at-home spouses than women are. Women, on the other hand, seem to sink more time into their kids, if they have it.

The happy spin from the authors is that the family-friendly policies aren't hurting the firms vis-à-vis their women employees, which makes the policies seem less costly. (Their original hypotheis was that the family-friendly firms would find that mothers were less productive, since these policies are often seen as the path to mommy tracking.) The finding about the men working less, though, throws a wrench into the discussion, doesn't it? Mothers are soldiering on for the firm, in gratitude for the break from crazy expectations or for whatever reason. Men are not. The authors ask, "How are men using their free time as a result of working fewer hours?" and then cite other evidence that men may plow their time into more leisure activities. Is that perfectly understandable, or is it shirking? Who's modeling the good behavior here?Given how hard law-firm lawyers often work, are fewer billable hours, whatever the equities, a reason to celebrate? It's hard to tell, but the gender split is there to be mulled over.

Over at Legal Blog Watch, Carolyn Elefant argues that billable hours are a bad measure of productivity. That makes sense to me as a reason that this study may not translate to other professions in which parents can argue they work more efficiently, squeezing more work into less time. But it doesn't seem like a salient criticism of these findings, since hours are firms' explicit measure of productivity.

I posted a version of this earlier over at XX factor, and now I'm curious about the reception to these findings in this neck of the woods.

Read more about the billable hour and family-friendly practices on Convictions, and a discussion on the same topic at our women's blog, XX Factor.