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作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?
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By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
Published: March 19, 2006
HUNDREDS of feet above Manhattan, the reception area of Proskauer Rose's headquarters boasts all of the muscular, streamlined ornamentation that symbolizes authority and power in a big city law firm — modern art, contemporary furniture, white marble floors, high ceilings and stunning views. The background music floating about this particular stage set is composed of the steady, reassuring cadences of talented, ambitious lawyers greeting their clients.
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Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Law schools graduate as many women as men, but few make partner, as Bettina B. Plevan did at Proskauer Rose.
Unequal Partners
Carol T. Powers for The New York Times
Karen Lockwood, a Washington lawyer, says firms need to look at the advancement and retention of women.
Bettina B. Plevan, a 60-year-old specialist in labor and employment law, has spent more than three decades at Proskauer navigating the professional riptides and intellectual cross-currents of firm life on her way to reeling in one of the legal world's most storied and most lucrative prizes: a partnership. Her corner office has evidence of the hard work that has gotten her here: stacks of legal documents sprout like small chimneys on her desk and floor, amid rows of black binders and brown accordion folders.
Compact, sharp-minded and direct, Ms. Plevan occasionally allows a knowing, engaging grin to wrap itself around her sentences as she shares her reasons for pursuing a partnership.
"I decided I wanted to be a partner shortly after I got here — by nature I have a lot of drive, I'm competitive and I have a lot of energy," she says. "For me, being a partner was a way in which my talents and skills could be recognized. And I wanted that recognition."
Ms. Plevan has that recognition. Besides the handsome salary and bragging rights accompanying the grueling hours and emotional juggling that constitute a partnership, she has earned ample plaudits from peers outside Proskauer. According to a small plaque, one among many stacked along her window, other lawyers around the country have voted her one of the "Best Lawyers in America" in each of the last 13 years.
Following in the footsteps of Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, Whitney North Seymour Jr. and Cyrus R. Vance, Ms. Plevan is president of the New York City Bar Association, only the second woman to hold that position since the organization's founding in 1870. She has a job that makes her happy and reflects her sense of herself. She is an accomplished lawyer. She has arrived.
She also is an anomaly.
Although the nation's law schools for years have been graduating classes that are almost evenly split between men and women, and although firms are absorbing new associates in numbers that largely reflect that balance, something unusual happens to most women after they begin to climb into the upper tiers of law firms. They disappear.
According to the National Association for Law Placement, a trade group that provides career counseling to lawyers and law students, only about 17 percent of the partners at major law firms nationwide were women in 2005, a figure that has risen only slightly since 1995, when about 13 percent of partners were women.
Even those who have made it to the top of their profession say that the data shows that women's legal careers involve distinct, often insurmountable hurdles and that those hurdles remain misunderstood or underexamined.
"You have a given population of people who were significantly motivated to go through law school with a certain career goal in mind," says Ms. Plevan, who notes that Proskauer has always provided her with a welcoming professional home. "What de-motivates them to want to continue working in the law?"
FOR years, one pat response to that question was that once law school graduation rates substantially equalized between men and women, that pipeline would fuel firm diversity and cause partnerships to equalize as well. Yet the pipeline has been gushing for about two decades and partnership disparity remains.
Although women certainly leave firms to become more actively involved in child-rearing, recent detailed studies indicate that female lawyers often feel pushed into that choice and would prefer to maintain their careers and a family if a structure existed that allowed them to do so. Some analysts and many women who practice law say that having children isn't the primary reason most women leave law firms anyhow; most, they say, depart for other careers or for different ways to practice law.
作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 an interesting NY times article, fist page only -- 中国律师 - (4905 Byte) 2006-3-20 周一, 10:23 (1019 reads)
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