Since the 1960s, women have begun emerging into the public sphere and the public/private divide has been eroding. However, women's participation in the public sphere remains limited by the ongoing need to do two jobs ('the double day'), working both in the home and in the labour market. Thus, a study conducted into gender difference in the legal professions in Ireland [Bacik, Ivana, Costello, Cathryn, and Drew, Eileen (2003), Gender InJustice: Feminising the legal professions?, Trinity College Dublin Law School, Dublin.] found that, while women are entering legal studies in increasing numbers, they remain concentrated at the lower levels of practice. Women lawyers have immense difficulty in achieving work/life balance, due to the long hours culture, an ingrained hostility to flexible work arrangements, and to the fact that they retain a disproportionate caring burden in the private sphere. Changes in the structuring of legal work are clearly required to address this gender imbalance and the associated work/life imbalance-but cultural changes are ultimately needed to end the ongoing "struggle to juggle." as these characteristics by their nature prevent women 37 from developing a sense of justice. 38 39 The public and private divide, although no longer 40 impermeable, remains. As Eisenstein (1981, p. 22) writes, 41 "although the meaning of 'public' and 'private' changes in 42 concrete ways, the assignment of public space to men and 43 private space to women is continuous in Western history. " 44 Walby (1990) has extended this to the theory of patriarchy 45 and the phenomenon of occupational segregation as a 46 crucial mechanism for ensuring women's subordination. 47 According to Walby, the strategy of exclusion was the 48 prevailing one in 19th century Britain that evolved into a 49 segregation strategy by the 20th century in Britain and 50 elsewhere. Hence, this represented a shift from 'private' 51 patriarchy in which women were excluded from paid work 52 and restricted to the domestic sphere to 'public' patriarchy 53 in which women gained limited access to lower grade and 54 lower paid work, often performed on a part-time basis.
