Those at the top of the employment ladder continue to be predominantly male and white. Only about 6.6 percent of Fortune 500 company executives are women and only 2.6 percent are minorities. On average women make up only 10 percent of the full professors in Ivy League universities.
Despite the special obligations of those in the legal profession to ensure ''the administration of justice," the situation of women lawyers is no better. Women represent only 11 percent of all partners in private law firms nationwide and less than 8 percent of federal and state judges. Demographics cannot and do not explain these pitiful statistics. For more than a decade, women have constituted more than one-third of law school enrollments and now form about 37 percent of the associate ranks at the nation's largest firms.
In a major study conducted by the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, the commission found that "attitudinal and structural barriers" account for the difficulties women lawyers face.
The commission, chaired at the time by Hillary Rodham Clinton, found, for example, that women "are often treated with a presumption of incompetence to be overcome only by flawless performance," whereas men are often "treated with a presumption of competence overcome only after numerous significant mistakes."
This differential scrutiny extends to styles of lawyering as well: "women who . . . act with assertive confidence risk being perceived as too aggressive . . . (al)though this type of behavior is rewarded when engaged in by men." The commission also found that law firms deny women mentoring opportunities, give women inferior work assignments and steer women away from major litigation and heavy client contact.
