Unpacking the Drivers of Gender Disparities in Promotion to Law Firm Partnership

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 22: Organizational Mechanisms of Gender Inequality

Abstract

Women are consistently under-represented within leadership in an especially high-status professional employment context: partnership positions at elite professional service (EPS) firms. Although women enter these firms roughly at parity to men, they typically make up fewer than one quarter of firm leaders. In this study, we leverage a unique dataset of longitudinal personnel records from a major U.S. law firm that contain multiple dimensions of performance over time that enable us to examine simultaneously how these three explanations shape the gender gap in internal promotions to partner. Our findings reveal that, despite important differences in performance measures and pre-promotion attrition, neither of these factors fully explain the gender gap in first promotion to partner at our firm. Instead, women are promoted to partner at roughly 2/3 the rate of men even after accounting for gender-based differences in performance and attrition, suggesting the need for further investigation of the differential treatment explanation. Indeed, our findings highlight two previously under-examined sources of differential treatment at the point of promotion: gendered returns to type and timing of performance. In particular, we show that, counter to prior literature that positions organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs)—institution-building activities that are essential for the day-to-day running of the firm but that do not directly generate revenue—as “non-promotable tasks,” OCBs do play a meaningful role in promotion decisions in EPS firms. However, they are viewed, valued, and rewarded differently depending on employee gender. Together, our findings suggest that gender gaps in promotion to partner in EPS firms are not reducible to gender differences in performance or attrition and can be intimately intertwined with gender-based differential treatment on particular dimensions of performance at particular times in one’s career.

Authors

• Jayanti Johanna Owens, Yale University

• Lauren Rivera, Northwestern University