That's the headline on a lengthy article in the Times's Sunday Business section.
A lot of the predictable responses are raised in order to answer the question: The inability of women to find firm mentors, the incompatibility between firm life and childrearing, the billable hours regime, and so on.
Though the article gets at it a bit towards the end, I wish there had been a more significant discussion of how the problems women cite are problems that it appears all firm lawyers have -- men and women alike. To be sure, these obstacles are usually more significant for women (particularly the mentoring problem), but most of the lifestyle problems at firms likewise present difficulties for male lawyers who want a fulfilling family life or social life outside the confines of the office.
UPDATE: I just saw the link to this post from PG at De Novo, whose take on the NYT article I enjoyed reading. Very quickly, though, I'd like to respond to some of the things written there.
First, to the extent that the story I asked for has been "more than twice told," I'd like to point out that the entire NYT story has been more than twice told. That doesn't make it any less important, nor does it make an account of the full dimensions of the problems discussed in the story any less imperative. Given the story's quick ascendance to the most e-mailed list, I'd venture to say that a lot of people are reading about this problem for the first time (almost all non-lawyers, I imagine).
He also endorses an argument from John Lott that we should all be cautious of embracing. Lott suggests that law schools may have managed to boost their female enrollment rates by lowering admission standards, and that this may be why women aren't excelling at law firms.
This is often the charge made about the enrollment of minority students, and it's no less unsupported in that context than it is in the context of female enrollment. No one who attends law school today can seriously contend that the women are any less smart than the men. And I don't see any reason to believe this is more true today than it was when women were first being recruited. If anything, the first women to be enrolled in limited numbers were probably the smartest of the potential female students. I think law schools and law firms just finally got around to tapping the intellectual resource that they had been idiotically overlooking for far too long.
Moreover, law schools have long been (and continue to be) in the business of choosing students based on criteria that are very poorly related to the skills that make a good attorney (consider oral advocacy, negotiating, and writing skills -- none of which seriously factor into the LSAT or most of our grade-inflated transcripts). So even if it were true that law schools lowered their admissions standards for women (again, I think it's not), that would still not explain why there is a gender gap at the highest reaches of private law firms -- which prize and reward an almost completely different set of skills.
UPDATE 2: In the comments, PG informs me that I misread the significance of his "Whaaa?" comment on Lott's argument and that, in fact, he does not endorse the view that law schools are (or were) admitting women of inferior skill. My sincere apologies for the mistake. Lott, however, very much does make the claim about the intellectual capability of women admitted to law schools in order to boost the schools' enrollment. For all the reasons I discussed, I think that claim is very wrong.
UPDATE 3: I just realized that I kept using "he" as the pronoun for PG, when in fact I have no idea whether PG is a male or female. Because of my initial misreading of his/her argument, I assumed PG was a male. But I have no idea.
