There may be some good news for women lawyers. According to a survey reported in a recent article on Above The Law, women general counsels are making an average of 8% more in salary than their male counterparts. That is something significant for women lawyers to consider when contemplating employment options. And, yes, this past summer has been referred to as the “Summer of Female Empowerment” at the box office with the likes of the Barbie movie meeting with more popularity and acceptance by female audiences than I ever would have predicted.
But, female empowerment in BigLaw is still moving at snail’s pace, and only 23 percent of equity partners in law firms today are women. So, the comparison becomes 77 points for men at law firms versus 108 per cent for women in the offices of general counsel in the business world. Or so it seems. And that alone might make a woman lawyer look seriously at the options outside of law firms.
However, we all know that salary is not a stagnant number. Once equity partnership is achieved in BigLaw, or even salary partnership for that matter, the roles are reversed and the general counsels become the proverbial salary snails. However, the road to equity partnership can be a rocky one for women attorneys, and comparisons are hard to make.
Even today, women lawyers face persistent issues of inequity, discrimination and baby penalties that should have been eliminated years ago. Experiences reported by recruiters in articles like this one include the “old saws” like the indignities of assuming that women lawyers will take the meeting notes and get the coffee to treating the genders unequally and presuming that males are more qualified to be relied upon as lawyers. As if this is not enough to make the case for immediate reforms, those articles also include examples of harsh and derogatory language used about and to women lawyers after they announce that they are pregnant and when they come back to resume their schedules after maternity leave. I started writing books and giving speeches to advocate for women lawyers in 2007, and I would not have predicted that this kind of behavior still would persist in 2023.
My hope is that leaders in law firms will wake up one of these days, give up this childish behavior, and start doing more of the right thing on behalf of women in the profession. For their sake, I hope it happens before there is a mass exodus to general counsels offices where the money currently comes with the message that women lawyers are valued.
