Three years after an Allegheny County Bar Association survey revealed a gap in pay between male and female lawyers, the group today will start its Institute for Gender Equality.

The institute, headed by bar association gender equality coordinator Linda Varrenti Hernandez, will offer classes targeting legal decision-makers, practitioners and law students in the upcoming months.

A luncheon today kicking off the program features first lady Marjorie Rendell, a federal appeals court judge, and Laurel Bellows, a women’s rights advocate.

“Women are leaving the practice of law in droves,” Hernandez said. “They’re not rising to positions of leadership. We really want to make an impact on that.”

Hernandez pointed to the results of a 2006 membership survey showing little or no improvement in pay disparity between male and female lawyers in the 15 years since a previous survey was conducted.

According to the survey, only about 5 percent of female lawyers make more than $250,000 a year. About 20 percent of men do. No women surveyed who graduated law school in the 1990s made $250,000 or more, while almost 10 percent of the male graduates of the 1990s did.

Nationally, about 17.3 percent of partners in law firms are women. In Allegheny County, 15.8 percent are, said Kim Brown, president of the county bar association.

The association has approximately 6,600 members, and about 1,780 of them women, spokesman Tom Loftus said.

Brown said the gap exists despite high-profile examples of women in leadership positions, such as U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, Allegheny County Common Pleas President Judge Donna Jo McDaniel and U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose, who recently stepped down as chief judge.

• “There has been a lot of progress in many areas of law, such as on the bench,” Brown said.
• “There’s an inability to crack that last barrier to succeed in law firms.”

Rendell, 61, who has been a federal judge for 16 years, said a lot has changed since she became a lawyer, but that much hasn’t.

She told one story of when she was an attorney, and a judge didn’t think she fit a lawyer’s description.

“He turned to me and said I should be a model. On one hand that’s very flattering but on the other hand, it’s not. You’re there representing a client,” Rendell said. “It’s little things like that.”

In an effort to raise awareness about the issues that may be contributing to wide disparities in pay and promotions between male and female lawyers, the Allegheny County Bar Association has launched an Institute for Gender Equality.

The institute, which will offer programs on topics such as women in leadership roles, mentoring and work-life balance, is among the recommendations contained in a report released yesterday by the bar association’s Gender Equality Task Force.

The task force was created in response to a 2005 survey that found female lawyers’ salaries and opportunities for career advancement had barely improved since 1990.

For the last 18 months, the task force has conducted research, held focus groups and engaged in one-on-one meetings with legal professionals — men and women whose jobs ranged from law clerks to top executives — to identify gender-related issues and develop a strategy to shrink the gender gap.

In addition to the new institute, the task force report recommended that law firms, corporate legal departments and other organizations that employ lawyers address a range of gender issues including unbiased compensation systems and initiatives that will help lower the number of women leaving the legal profession.

Task force members said creation of the institute was their top recommendation because it involves taking specific actions to resolve gender-related problems.

“What we’d like to do is really take charge of the issue and eradicate inequality within the Allegheny County Bar Association and the legal community here,” said U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan, task force co-chair.

“I didn’t think programming held four times a year would be effective enough,” said Linda Varrenti Hernandez, gender equality coordinator for the bar association and author of the report. “We had to provide an opportunity for everyone to partake in the solution to this problem. Whatever we had to do had to be more permanent. If we don’t do something like this, we’ll lose the incentive we need to go forward.”

The institute will track participants and what classes they take and follow up with them for feedback, said Ms. Varrenti Hernandez.

For instance, someone enrolled in a negotiation skills class might later answer a survey from the institute about what he or she learned, whether he or she used the skills and if they were effective.

“It’s important to have some tool to measure the results without waiting another considerable amount of time,” said Ms. Varrenti Hernandez. “We didn’t want to wait another 15 years to do another survey.”

Among the findings of the bar association’s 2005 survey were that female lawyers were more likely to report lower salaries than men with comparable education and responsibilities; and that women were twice as likely than men to be dissatisfied with their job situation. Overall, the study concluded that women lawyers weren’t doing much better in terms of pay and professional advancement than they were at the time of the last survey on gender issues in 1990.

The Institute for Gender Equality, expected to offer classes beginning in early 2009, will target three groups, said Ms. Varrenti Hernandez: decision-makers at law firms, corporations, government agencies and other organizations; practicing attorneys; and law school students. Classes will be held at the bar association’s Downtown offices and other locations.

Participants will pay for classes, and programs will include local and national speakers. The institute also will develop a mobile component to provide programming at various locations.

“I think the most important outcome, frankly, of all of this is heightened awareness of the situation,” said Timothy Ryan, chief executive officer of Downtown law firm Eckert Seamans and a member of the task force’s best practices subcommittee.

“Even if you don’t believe the problem exists, if it’s perceived, in many ways, it’s real.”

Eckert Seamans created its own women’s initiative about a year ago, Mr. Ryan said, “because we believe there is an issue in the workplace.”

Among the ways Eckert is trying to address gender issues is by providing flex-time scheduling and mentoring programs for its staff, Mr. Ryan said.

Judge Pupo Lenihan is optimistic the Gender Equality Institute and other initiatives will help to eventually eliminate the kind of obstacles she encountered as a woman rising through the ranks of private law firms after she graduated from law school in 1983.

“I don’t feel there was intentional discrimination, but often women were treated differently. It was a little bit harder to get involved with firm activities if you didn’t golf. And it was harder to meet clients and bring in business. There was not a lot of training for that kind of thing.”

One of the reasons she jumped from private practice to a government job was to better juggle her career with the demands of raising three children. “At a law firm, it’s hard to bill hours, bring in business and still raise a family.”

The judge believes that pay disparities between male and female lawyers have increased because women “aren’t staying with firms to reach levels where they’re making the money that men are making at top levels.”

The goal of the task force, she said, “is to address the issues that are causing them to drop out.”

According to the report published by the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, among the top 25 men’s and women’s teams, college charged nearly three times as much, on average, for single-game seats for men’s games. Additionally, the average highest-priced season ticket package came in at $233 for women as opposed to $2,500 for men.

In the report authors Laura Pappano and Allison J. Tracy claim athletic departments are engaging in “institutional discrimination that is camouflaged as sensible economic practice” by charging significantly less for women’s competition.

The threat this practice poses to the pursuit of gender equity is an obvious concern, but it is also important to consider what else may be at risk by altering ticket prices.

If elevating female ticket prices drives away fans, especially in a sensitive economic climate, would the financial equity be worth risking the competition environment for female student-athletes?

At most institutions men’s basketball is one of very few revenue-producing sports. Contrary to popular misconceptions, this revenue is used to fund programs and initiatives throughout the athletic department–not simply the men’s basketball team. In this sense, the entire athletics program benefits by achieving the maximum amount of revenue possible from men’s tickets sales. Is standardizing admission worth lowering ticket prices and risking losing necessary athletics revenue?

By driving prices down, more people are able to attend female athletic events and hopefully will become interested and emotionally invested in the sport. Once that investment exists, the initiative to standardize ticket prices against gender lines can more accurately and seriously be evaluated.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right party has put forward legislation that would see women make up half the figures in France’s leading boardrooms by 2015, under a bold plan to impose gender equality on the male-dominated business world.

In a bill submitted to the French parliament this week, all companies listed on the Paris stock exchange would have to ensure female employees made up 50% of their board members by 2015. If passed, a gradual implementation of the law would see businesses obliged to have women in 20% of board seats within 18 months, and 40% within four years.

Jean-François Copé, president of the majority UMP party, said it could give a “much-needed electro-shock” to the French corporate world, long considered a bastion reserved for the male elite in which only 10.5% of board members in CAC 40 (French stock market index) companies are female.

Referring to France’s move in 2000 to encourage gender equality in politics, he said: “We must do to companies what we did in the public domain a few years ago and impose parity.”

The proposals, which would also apply to state-owned companies and non-listed firms with supervisory boards, will be debated next month and would need the approval of both houses of parliament to become law.

Despite the historically entrenched opposition of business chiefs to quotas, advocates say the bill is the result of a sea change in public attitudes towards gender equality. Over the past year a series of French figures not known for their feminist stance have spoken out in favour of quotas.

Daniel Lebègue, president of the conservative French Institute of directors (IFA), said his organisation had reluctantly decided they were the only way of encouraging progress. Nadine Morano, the secretary of state for the family, has said quotas are a “necessary evil”, while the president of Areva, Anne Lauvergeon, recently admitted she had changed her mind about a strategy she nonetheless acknowledged as “humiliating”.

Véronique Préaux-Cobti, a leading businesswoman, said the discussions were a sign that times had changed.

• “In 2002, a huge majority would have been against,” she told Le Figaro earlier this year.
• “Now, after years of good will with no change, there is a real realisation that things are not going to change on their own.”

Cope and the bill’s other author, the UMP’s Marie-Jo Zimmermann, are determined to capitalise on the change in public opinion to drive through the reforms. Inspired by the example set in Norway, where enforced quotas have led to 40% of director posts being occupied by women, they say they are willing to take on the “reserves” of several government ministers.

Their boss, President Sarkozy, was congratulated in 2007 for appointing seven women to his 15-member cabinet. However three of those, including former Justice Minister Rachida Dati, have since been replaced, giving rise to one news weekly wondering if he was starting to show his true “macho” colours.

France’s failure to impose parity on its politicians, despite a constitution change in 2000 hich had the aim of giving women a larger presence in the French parliament, is one of the reasons many people remain sceptical about this week’s proposals. At the last election, only 18% of MPs in the lower house were women.

Françoise de Panafieu, one of those MPs, hit out today at her own party for setting out quotas for the business world when it had failed to put its own house in order. “I prefer people setting an example to those giving lessons,” she told L’Express magazine, claiming that Sarkozy’s party had had to pay €5m (£4.5m) in fines after the 2007 elections for failing to impose parity.

The Norway Way

Norway was the pioneer in introducing legislation to boost the number of women on company boards, in 2003. The change in the law affected nearly 500 public companies, including 175 firms listed on the Oslo stock exchange. Ministers stipulated that businesses should increase the number of women on their boards to 40% or face the threat of closure.

It unleashed an uproar in the Norwegian business community, with many protesting it was ridiculous to shut down a company because it lacked a woman on the board. Others argued that the law infringed the rights of shareholders to decide who they want as directors. But the threat worked and company owners duly complied. Norway now has the highest proportion of
women on boards anywhere in the world with 44.2% – up from 6% in 2001. By comparison, in the UK, 12% of FTSE 100 directors are female and one in four boards are exclusively male. Sweden and Finland boast more women at leading companies at 22% and 17% respectively.

The proportion of female directors among US Fortune 500 firms is 15.2%.