Law firm partners

Here`s another cookie-cutter, why-are-there-not-enough-women-in-power-in..(insert any industry you can think of)..., advocacy article written by and for gender feminists. The article is a standard template for deploring the dearth of women in top positions and urging the society to change its attitude and calling for more women in top positions. It`s so predictable from the beginning to end.

Some people simply automatically assumes that achievements and grades at certain point in lifetime (percentage of women in top law schools in this case) must be reflected at the exact same proportion in any point in the following continuum of lifecycle (women ending in partner status in prestigious law firms) or there must be some reasons ・translation - discrimination, barrier, bias, and stereotype.

It is simply astounding that people with such high education and supposedly high intelligence so as to get a positions in big law firms and editorial room of newspaper do not understand that demographic group is nothing but an aggregate of individuals and individuals have choices in free country; moreover individuals choice is influenced by natural genetic differences or circumstance. May be there are well aware of this and are embarking on a massive campaign of denial, denial of and individual free choices, denial of nature and genetic differences, so that they could re-program our thought and behavior, and enforce their utopian vision of absolute statistical gender parity?

One thing that is repeated in this article and other similar article that advocates more women in top position is that retention and promotion of more women is "winning business strategy." However, I have never seen any data or evidence to backup this claim that is so central to their entire argument. Even though the author preemptively qualifies in the article that retention and promotion of women is not merely good-will gesture, it remains to be so as long as there is no rock-solid evidence to back it up.

Why will it be a winning business strategy? In order for one to categorically state that retention and promotion of women is a winning business strategy for law firm, there must be clear economic, not just moral or psychological, benefit to it.

Is there evidence that those female lawyers leaving law firms were better than male lawyers who are staying? Or is it simply a loss of average or sub-average employee for which the law firm`s loss is the money and time it expended for the training of such employees? If so, law firms could cover and eventually overcome such loss by employing male lawyers, who might have been passed over for female candidate due to explicit or inexplicit affirmative action/gender quota by the hiring manager. Many of the female lawyers would say there were disappointed, felt unwelcome, or the atmosphere was not conducive to exercising their maximum potential, or in any other pathetic whining way. But what would the law firms feel? Maybe they were also disappointed by the performance of these female lawyers? Especially after years of substantial efforts and expenditures to comply to feminist-dictated female friendly workplace, after so much bending backwards to cater and cajole to feminists demand, and still what all female lawyers, with brilliant education and six to seven-figure income, benefiting from female specific training and development programme and other gender-specific entitlements, could produce is a further whining about not women-friendly or sensitive enough workplace?

In addition to proven innate difference in the brain structure and the resultant behavior differences between men and women, there are other differences between them when it comes to work and how they view achievement; men simply do their job, by setting goals, plan and prioritize tasks. Achievement for men is something that they have to strive for and work hard for. For women, achievement, or a result is something that needs to be guaranteed by government or some authorities regardless of their ability or efforts or accomplishment, an accessory to a position that they get also through affirmative action or other government-sanctioned gender-empowerment programme.

New York Times March 19, 2006
Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?
By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/business/yourmoney/19law.html?_r=1&oref=slogin