| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Joan Brockman, Gender in the Legal Profession: Fitting or Breaking the Mould (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2001)

DESPITE THE FACT that some women enter the legal profession in order to enhance their power in society, problems that arise in the labour force generally, such as discrimination and sexual harassment, also manifest themselves within the practice of law. Studies reveal that women lawyers earn less than male lawyers and are less likely to become partners in law firms. Many of these problems reflect a deeply gendered notion of "the lawyer" and a workplace structured on an assumption that lawyers are not encumbered by obligations such as childcare. Joan Brockman's important new book explores these questions, placing them in the context of conditions of work such as the expanding work week.

The book is based on an empirical study of 100 British Columbia lawyers called to the bar between 1986 and 1990, and who were still practising when the random sample was drawn. Brockman uses extensive quotations from interviews with these lawyers to convey their views and experiences, making the book a fascinating, accessible read. The chapters are focused on different themes that were drawn out in the interviews: why people went into law and what they like and dislike about it, work histories, discrimination and sexual harassment, views on the adversarial system, and difficulties of balancing work and family responsibilities. Throughout the book, which reports extensive data from this study and others that I cannot begin to relate in this review, Brockman highlights differences between women and men when they arose, notably in relation to career advancement, discrimination and harassment, and work and family conflict. Her overall theme is that despite the elimination of the exclusionary techniques used historically to keep women and racialized groups out of the legal profession (Chapter 1), their full participation in the profession remains inhibited. Women may be entering law school in the same, or greater, numbers than men, but they are not yet fully participating citizens in the profession.

Of interest to me as a law professor, who often fields inquiries from (especially female) students with a social conscience wanting to know how they can find a meaningful job in law, was the number of lawyers who were dissatisfied with the practice of law. Brockman found that only 50 per cent of the women and 62 per cent of the men were satisfied with the practice of law overall; and only 60 per cent of the women and 70 per cent of the men said that they would go to law school if they could "do it over again." (26) Put together with the fact that 31.4 per cent of the women and 25.6 per cent of the men who were called to the bar at the same time as the lawyers interviewed by Brockman had already left the practice of law, there clearly are some problems with the legal profession and the statistics indicate that these problems have a gendered impact.

Brockman found that although women and men go to law school for relatively similar reasons, their experiences once in practice are less similar. For instance, only 54 per cent of the women, compared with 76 per cent of the men, had practised law continuously since their call to the bar. The women were more likely than the men to give as a reason for leaving a position the existence of discrimination or that they were looking for less stress (more balance) in their lives. When asked whether they thought there was bias or discrimination against women that restricted their career advancement, 88 per cent of the women and 66 per cent of the men responded "Yes." A rather shocking 36 per cent of the women in the study had been sexually harassed since entering the profession by other lawyers, judges, or clients. In terms of income, although women may earn slightly more than men by the third year of their call, their incomes did not rise appreciably after that time. In contrast, the incomes of male lawyers increased sharply as they became more experienced. As Brockman states: "It may be that, in the legal profession at least, women not only run into a glass ceiling, but in fact they start out very close to it." (60) In terms of achieving positions of power with law firms, the picture is grim: "Women do not become partners at the same rate as men, women are more likely to remove themselves or be removed from partnership track than men, and women appear to have to perform better than men to achieve partnership. In some cases, no matter what women do, they are not considered partnership material." (65) If women copied male super-achievers and put in long hours, they sometimes succeeded. But if they had family obligations or sought to bring different values into the workplace, success was less possible despite the lip service that is now being paid to gender equality. Although Brockman's study and book focus mainly on gender, her data also reveals problems related to race, sexual orientation, age, family status, and disability.

The last chapter deals with strategies for change. Brockman points to the possibility that ultimately, solutions to ongoing discrimination may lie outside the legal profession as much as or more than within it. As Chapter 6 illustrates, the greatest barrier to equality in the paid workforce may actually derive from the disproportionate responsibility that women still carry for child care and household work. The location of the legal profession within a largely corporate market with clients who demand 7-days-a-week, 24-hours-a-day, means that anyone who attempts to achieve a healthy work/life balance or has childcare or other caring responsibilities will inevitably encounter difficulties. Brockman found that in her random sample of young lawyers, only 26 per cent of the women had children, whereas 50 per cent of the men did. As well, most women with children had them before their call to the bar.

Women, more than men, perceived the practice of law as being an impediment to having children. Some of the men wanted to be more involved with their children and Brockman raises the possibility that this sentiment might motivate the men to support workplace changes. Discouragingly, upon a closer look, it appeared that the men hoped to reduce their typically overtime work weeks (one man worked 95-100 hours-per-week and wished to reduce that number to 50 hours-per-week) to something closer to the normative work week. They would still rely on their female spouses to do more than their share of child care and household work. Several men actually increased their workload when children were born so that their spouses could either reduce or eliminate their time in the paid workforce. Thus the traditional sexual division of labour was reinforced rather than challenged.

This book will be of interest to lawyers, sociologists, and legal academics who are studying the shifting demographics of the legal profession, researchers who are interested in the ways that gender plays out in various fields of work, and anyone who is contemplating a legal career. A key insight is that law remains a workaholic profession, with the women in Brockman's study working a median of 47 hours-per-week and the men a median of 50 hours-per-week. Law firms are basically businesses and operate to a corporate bottom line, which makes it difficult to envision changes (such as part-time work or job-sharing) that would better enable full participation by those who have responsibilities outside their professional lives. Changing this work environment may require changes to the socio-economic structures within which the legal profession operates, including the overall sexual division of labour. As Brockman concludes: "The old mould of the legal profession will only be altered when the old mould of the family is altered, so that not only do women 'fit the mould' at work, but men 'fit the mould' at home." (215) Meanwhile, women in the legal profession will no doubt continue to press for more short-term changes that might ameliorate their conditions of work and enable them to be full citizens in the legal profession. Brockman's outstanding book provides much food for thought about systemic problems that persist within a profession that is supposed to stand for justice in our society, and both short-term and long-term strategies to deal with them.


Susan B. Boyd University of British Columbia

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