The Continuing Exodus of Women from Law Firms

The MIT Workplace center just released a new report "Women Lawyers and Obstacles to Leadership" documenting the exodus of women from law firms and its effect on male/female partnership ratios in law firms in Massachusetts.  From the summary:

Massachusetts law firms do not generally assume responsibility for the need of their lawyers to take time for their families. The result is an exodus of women from firm practice and an extremely low number of women among equity partners—the present ratio being 17% women, 83% men. These conclusions emerge from a recent report of two MIT Workplace Center surveys tracking the career paths of nearly 1000 women and men in Massachusetts firms over a five year period.

The specific findings of the surveys show that women and men enter law firms in essentially equal numbers but women leave firm practice at every pre-partner level at a far higher rate than men—more than 30% for women and less than 20% for men. The primary reason, far above all others, is the need for more time for family than the firms support. And this reason is borne out by what these women do when they leave. They do not opt out of the workforce. Nearly 80% move to workplaces that do allow the time they need, even if they are working fulltime.

The survey also shows the promise of reduced hours as a means of solving the time-squeeze problem. 47% of women with children practice part-time at some point, and those who do stay in their firms longer than women with children who work full-time. But the promise is unfulfilled because those who take part-time are likely to be penalized later. They are less likely to make partner than those who are able to stay full-time.

I haven't had a chance to read the whole report yet, but a Boston Globe article about it raised this concern:

The study echoes the findings of other recent major reports, but offers more detailed statistics and demographic data. It also aims to draw attention to the social consequences of this troubling exodus: As fewer women ascend to leadership positions in their firms, the pool of women qualified to become judges, law professors, business chiefs , and law firm managers is shrinking.

. . . For years, law firm leaders have insisted that as more women graduate from law school and enter private practice, the presence of women in leadership positions in the judiciary, in business, and in academia would grow correspondingly. But even though the gender gap in law firm hiring has been narrowing over the past decade, women are dropping off the partner track at alarming rates.

I think that is a valid point, generally, though I question whether that's true in academia.  Doesn't  staying in private practice long enough to make partner virtually disqualify you from a tenure-track position in most law schools?  The way this same dilemna plays itself out in academia is the timing of the tenure track, and the paucity of part-time tenure track or options of pausing the tenure track, as I've argued and documented elsewhere.

But are the social consequences of the lack of women in leadership positions really all that adverse?   Maybe we're all just better off if at least one spouse prioritizes her children over her career.  As I've argued here before, though, and as I've argued elsewhere, too, I think there are very serious reasons to be concerned about the persistence of this imbalance.