Recent study has postulated that women lawyers are leaving their professional career more rapidly in comparison to men because of inflexible challenges in their attempts to reach the high profile positions, consequent upon which, the pool of women qualified to become judges, law professors, business chiefs and law firm managers is shrinking.
Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a senior partner at the law firm Bowditch asserted,
This shows that we are reaching a crisis point when it comes to the retention and advancement of women in the legal profession.
Previously, it was anticipated that as more women graduate from law school and enter private practice, their presence in high profile legal position would also increase. 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.
The data has been collected from 1000 Massachusetts lawyers and it revealed that 31 percent of female associates had left private practice entirely, compared with 18 percent of male associates and gap widens among associates with children, to 35 percent and 15 percent.
The findings postulated that dropout rate among women lawyers is overwhelmingly the result of the combination of demanding hours, inflexible schedules, lack of viable part-time options, emphasis on billable hours, and failure by law firms to recognize that female lawyers’ career trajectories may alternate between work and family.
Of women who jump off partnership track, slightly more than half move to legal positions at nonprofit groups, government agencies, or corporations, where their schedules are often less grueling, according to the report. But 46 percent leave the law altogether, compared with less than a third of men who leave the partnership track.
