Perceiving Discrimination: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in the Legal Workplace

Abstract

Using quantitative and qualitative data from a large national sample of lawyers, we examine self-reports of perceived discrimination in the legal workplace. Across three waves of surveys, we find that persons of color, white women, and LGBTQ attorneys are far more likely to perceive they have been a target of discrimination than white men. These differences hold in multivariate models that control for social background, status in the profession and the work organization, and characteristics of the work organization. Qualitative comments describing these experiences reveal that lawyers of different races, genders, and sexual orientations are exposed to distinctive types of bias, that supervisors and clients are the most frequent sources of discriminatory treatment, and the often-overt character of perceived discrimination. These self-reports suggest that bias in the legal workplace is widespread and rooted in the same hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation that pervade society.

“I haven't come a long way, and I'm not a baby”: Task assignment and diversity of the Supreme Court bar

“…Studies of this type are consistent with a long line of sociolegal studies of the legal profession (e.g., Gorman 2006;Heinz et al 2005;Heinz 1977, 1979;Nelson 1981;Nelson et al 2019;Sterling and Reichman 2016).…”

“…Still further, while our focus in the present work was on the relevance of sex or gender as a status characteristic, research suggests that other demographic characteristics, like attorney race or ethnicity, might also influence assignment opportunities for similar reasons. In addition, intersectionality scholarship (see, e.g., Hancock 2007;Nelson et al 2019) suggests the value of considering multiple traits of a person together in analyses of this type. One reason we have not explored these issues in the present study relates to the inherent difficulty of identifying the race or ethnicity of the attorneys in our data set.…”

“…To the extent that negative gender stereotypes of competence are also assumed by clients, they may tend to request male attorneys. Nelson et al (2019Nelson et al ( , p. 1064, for example, find that female attorneys are as much as 2.3-2.8 times more likely to have clients request another attorney than male attorneys. Moreover, there is some evidence that private firms tend to leave female lawyers out of client pitches (Nelson et al 2019), all but guaranteeing the client will prefer male representation.…”

The Divergent Mental Health Effects of Dashed Expectations and Unfulfilled Aspirations: Evidence from American Lawyers’ Careers

“…We also entered a variable for transitions in parental status , that is, whether the respondent became a parent or had an additional child between the survey waves (compared to those with no children). Lastly, we included whether the respondent had experienced discrimination at work using a six-item index (e.g., demeaning comments, request for another attorney; see Nelson et al 2019). We compared (a) those with consistently high levels of discrimination (i.e., higher than the sample mean at both AJD2 and AJD3) and (b) those with increasing levels of discrimination across waves to lawyers with (c) no or decreasing levels of discrimination over time.…”

‘All eyes are on you’: Gender, race, and opinion writing on the US Courts of Appeals

“…Our findings suggest that norms about crafting judicial opinions are gendered and racialized in ways that create higher workloads for women and judges of color.Prestigious legal positions in the United States are filled, overwhelmingly, by white men. Women and people of color are underrepresented as tenured law school faculty and deans, as general counsel of Fortune 500 companies, and as partners in law firms (Kellerman & Rhode, 2017;Nelson et al, 2019). In state judiciaries, a 2019 report noted that white men constituted 56% of state supreme court seats, in spite of making up less than one third of the US population (Robbins & Bannon, 2019).…”