Abstract
<em>In this article, we examine gender and the work culture in Australian private law firms. Our primary focus is the extent to which flexible work practices remain a quagmire for female lawyers. We consider the systemic barriers affecting women lawyers, including hidden attitudes, the persistence of a gendered division of labour in the private sphere, the ongoing gender pay gap in Australia, and the ways in which the law firm ethos of long working hours disadvantages women. We then present some practical steps to remedy this situation, including accommodating working mothers’ time constraints, mentoring and networking, and training for managers and support staff. It is proposed that more needs to be done to encourage employers to implement these methods with confidence that flexible work arrangements can provide benefit to the firm as a whole, as well as individual employees. To achieve this, we put forward a reform of the framework in order to implement these practical steps. We also discuss some ways to possibly effect attitudinal change in law firm culture and conclude with some observations about the future of legal practice in this context. Finally, further involvement of the Law Council of Australia is proposed, to impose conditions on the practising certificates of lawyers in supervisory roles to assist them in complying with the framework. This would also ensure that flexible work arrangements are accessible to both employers and employees, which in turn will assist in dissolving the systematic discrimination that female lawyers face in private law firms.</em>
Highlights
This article examines work culture in private law firms in Australia and discusses the extent to which flexible work practices remain a quagmire for female lawyers
Being ‘other’ for female lawyers, working mothers, is ‘systematically factored into the structuring of contemporary legal practice, and has lodged deep within the recesses of the legal psyche’.14. We look at these and other variables which holistically constitute the barriers to successful implementation of flexible work practices in the legal profession
The sub-culture is characterised by practices, such as billable hours and myths about what it means to be a ‘good’ lawyer, which are a bad ‘fit’ for working mothers
Summary
This article examines work culture in private law firms in Australia and discusses the extent to which flexible work practices remain a quagmire for female lawyers. There is a perception of the ‘ideal lawyer’ being ‘the unencumbered worker [a]s the worker who you know will go far’, which assumes he is able to ‘slough off relational ties in order to devote himself unconditionally to work’.33 This stereotype is embedded so deeply into the ideal of ‘the perfect lawyer’ that unconscious biases remain a key cultural barrier for diversity and the integration of women working flexibly in the legal profession.[34] One of the female lawyers that Joanne Bagust spoke to noted: ‘We’ve still got a couple of partners who I would say are not fully comfortable with working mothers, as extraordinary as that might seem in this day and age.’ 35 in one study where female Senior Counsels were interviewed, one commented ‘I’m female and that takes you out of the mainstream at silk level straight away’, with another stating ‘[gender differences] are obvious’.36. The ‘master narratives’ of law tend to portray women according to a few outmoded stereotypes associated with the body, sexuality, subordination in marriage, and the supposed vacuity of the female mind.[49]
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