Gender Bias in the Legal Profession:

Although the number of women in the legal profession has increased dramatically over the last 20 years, evidence shows that women continue to lag well behind men on every indicator of success. While the differences in the careers of women and men lawyers have been explained in terms of either structural organizational constraints or tokenism, neither adequately addresses the persistence of the gender-based pecking order in law. It is argued here that part of the reason why this two-tiered pecking order persists is related to the meanings attached to gender itself. No one has examined the social construction of gender in the legal profession. Thus, the analyses reported here add a new dimension to the research on the legal profession. This paper focuses on the content of gender interpretations and the professional contexts in which these interpretations are found. I examine these by analyzing the attitudes of women and men lawyers and their observations of gender bias in professional situations. I predict that men lawyers will hold more traditional attitudes about gender roles than women lawyers and that women lawyers will observe more gender bias than men lawyers. Using data from a large survey of lawyers (N = 1,863) in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan area, I compare (1) the gender role attitudes of women and men lawyers; (2) the observations of gender bias in the professional interactions of women and men lawyers; and (3) I analyze women lawyers' accounts of their personal experiences with gender bias. The results support the predictions, and these findings are augmented by analysis of in-depth accounts of actual experiences of gender bias by women lawyers in the course of doing legal work.