The XX Factor: What women really think.

Dear Emily,

 

Once, at a dinner party honoring the retirement of a friend of my father-in-law, I sat next to the law firm's former managing partner. You would have heard of the firm; it's one of those with huge offices in New York and Washington and all over the world. And perhaps because this man was himself retired, he was unusually frank about things. One thing he was frank about was the way law firms treat women.

 

He wasn't going to talk to me about sexism or harassment or anything like that, he said. His complaint was a structural one. Given that half the graduating classes of the top law schools are women, he said, and that as many women rank at the top of their classes as men, law firms that want to stay competitive in their recruiting have to figure out how to make their workplaces more appealing to women. I was thrilled to hear that the young women he had been interviewing had been very clear about wanting to have families and very forward-thinking in the way they negotiated before they even took a job. I don't remember my generation—my college classmates—being so realistic. We were going to muddle through, and in the end vast numbers of us dropped out. Young men were also asking about the firm's family policies, he said. They saw their female counterparts negotiating deals that would let them spend more time with their children, and they wanted deals like that, too.

 

But, my friend said, law firms are never going to be able to keep their promises not to discriminate against lawyers who turn into caregivers, are never going make their workplaces truly family-friendly, unless they change the way they do business. The billable hour, he said: That's the problem. As long as the measure of productivity is the billable hour, lawyers fighting to get home to their children will always look less productive than lawyers who can work all night. Said my friend the managing partner: We all know lawyers who can get twice as much done in the same time as other lawyers, but those lawyers are not rewarded for their efficiency, or, at least, they're not rewarded enough—because they're not bringing in money. And we all know women who become twice as productive in the same time after they've had children, because they know they've got no slack at the end of the day. They're not rewarded, either. To take an obvious example of how status is allotted to the lawyer with the most available hours, he said, imagine you're a partner who has to pick someone to head up an important case. You are never going to chose someone who goes home at 5 p.m. Your team leader will to be a person who can put in as many hours as it takes, both to keep the client happy and to keep the firm's bill as high as it can be.

 

In other words, he said, in the through-the-looking-glass economy of the law firm, efficiency is a lesser criterion than availability. The irony of this upside-down ethos, my friend observed, is that it costs clients quite a lot of money. Imagine, he said, that law firms billed by the project, rather than by the hour, and that they bid against each other for projects. And now imagine how much lower a bid a firm could make if it rewarded its lawyers for working quickly rather than giving them incentives to work slowly. Clients would save money, law firms would be more competitive, and efficient lawyers would advance to the heads of their firms. All this is quite obvious to everyone involved in managing a law firm, he said. But for reasons too complicated to get into here—though the word "inertia" appears in each of them—no one wants to change the way things are done. Or maybe they don't want to be the first to do so. And yet until they do, he said, the needs of law firms and the needs of families will always be at odds with each another.

 

Now that's just one man's rant, of course. But it struck me as worth repeating.

 

Best,

Judith