Female lawyers and work-life balance

(Speaking of work-life balance, one-week vacations really take several weeks. The week before you leave, you're running around trying to get stuff done so you can leave. Then there's the vacation itself. Then you come back to the pile of stuff that's accumulated while you were away. Several weeks later, you're back to normal. And there's my explanation for the gap in the posts. Now on with the show ...)

Last Wednesday, The Boston Globe's law-business reporter Sacha Pfeiffer had a great piece breaking down a recent MIT Workplace Center survey on women in the law. Sacha's story is here and you can download the complete report here (PDF). Peter Lattman's indispensable Wall Street Journal Law Blog also posts on the story, drawing some interesting comments.

Highlights from Sacha's story include:

• Of 1,000 associates surveyed, 31% of women had left the law, compared to 18% of men
• 35% of female associates with children had stopped practicing, compared to 15% of father-associates
• 40% of female lawyers have worked part time, compared to nearly no male associates
• Of women who drop off the partnership track, 46% stop practicing completely, versus less than a third of men

One of the most troubling statistics to me was that of the firms asked to participate in the survey — the 100 largest in Massachusetts — only half responded. This strikes me as the ostrich approach to the problem.

We've talked about work-life balance in this space before: see "Lawyers and work-life balance" and "More on billable hours and work-life balance." I believe that the biggest obstacle to lawyers' work-life balance — regardless of gender — is the single-minded devotion law firms have to billable hours. If the only metric for associate performance that matters is total number of hours billed per year, then it's no wonder half of the law firms didn't bother to respond to this important survey.

On the other hand, see what your clients care more about: how many hours your firm billed, or how many female lawyers you have. The answers might surprise you.