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The Gender Pay Gap and High-Achieving Women in the Legal Profession

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2022

Milan Markovic
Affiliation:
Professor and Presidential Impact Fellow, Texas A&M University School of Law, Fort Worth, United States Email: mmarkovic@law.tamu.edu
Gabriele Plickert
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, California State Polytechnic University-Pomona, Pomona, United States

Abstract

Although women have made significant strides in the legal profession, female attorneys continue to earn far less than male attorneys. Relying on survey data from a large sample of full-time attorneys in Texas, we find a gender pay gap of thirty-five thousand dollars at the median that cannot be explained by differences in human capital or occupational segregation. We also provide evidence that the legal market especially disadvantages women who excel in law school. Whereas high academic achievement boosts male lawyers’ incomes substantially, it does not have the same effect on female lawyers’ incomes. High-achieving female lawyers earn less than high-achieving male lawyers across practice settings and earn less than their lower-achieving male counterparts in private practice. We conclude that discrimination in the legal profession operates partly by devaluing female attorneys’ human capital, such that sterling academic credentials and other traits that are valued in men are far less valued in women.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

This research benefited from the grant support of the AccessLex Institute, Directed Grants Program, https://www.accesslex.org/research/awarded-grants?f%5B0%5D=awarded_grant_status%3A310. For an overview of the data, see Markovic and Plickert 2018, 2019.

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