This article seeks to identify the mechanisms underlying the gender wage gap among new lawyers. Relying on nationally representative data to examine the salaries of lawyers working fulltime in private practice, we find a gender gap of about 5 percent. Identifying four mechanisms -work profiles, opportunity paths and structures, credentials, and legal markets -we first estimate how much of the gap stems from the differential valuation of women's endowments; second, we estimate the effects of different endowments for men and women; and third we assess both these possibilities. The analyses indicate that none of these mechanisms can fully account for the gender gap. Experimental studies that indicate women's work is less valued and rewarded than men's suggest new directions for research on gendered compensation.Across occupations, it is professional women who experience the largest withinjob gender wage gap (Peterson and Morgan 1995). The disparity emerges quickly, with a small gender wage gap among college graduates, then widens over time (Dey and Hill 2007; Maume 2004) -so that as women's professional careers progress, they lose ground in cumulative fashion (Peterson and Saporta 2004; Valian 1998). Yet with the unprecedented numbers of women entering professional careers in recent decades, the sources and the extent of this initial wage gap for the most recent cohort remain elusive.Early work attributed this persistent inequality to a comparatively small number of women in professions (Kanter 1977). However even with the recent surge in the number of women joining the professions (Spraggins 2005; Wootton 1997), it remains unclear whether this influx of women has now leveled the occupational terrain. Across different professions, studies indicate conflicting findings about whether the longstanding pattern of inequity is ending for these new cohorts (Bertrand and Hallock 2001;Blair-Loy and Wharton 2004;Morgan 1998;Noonan et al. 2005;Prokos and Padavic 2005). For example, Morgan's work on engineers suggests a generational convergence in male and female salaries, with the gender gap among younger cohorts of engineers now close to nil (see also Petersen and Morgan 1995).

This article tells the story of the establishment of the Law and Society Association in the early to mid-1960s. To tell the story, the authors concentrate on the personal stories of the individuals active in that early period and on four university campus sites—the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Denver, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin—at which much of the impetus was focused. They also examine key institutions that funded and/or encouraged links between law and social science—the Russell Sage Foundation, the Walter E. Meyer Research Institute of Law, and the American Bar Foundation. The article seeks also to investigate more generally the factors that came together to build a field of law and social science—which in turn helped to provide the ideas and build the institutions involved in the Johnson administration's War on Poverty. The field was created in part by a process involving both competition and cooperation between law and social science over the new terrain of social problems of racial discrimination, poverty, and crime. The authors suggest that, over time, the center of gravity of the field moved toward law, leaving the social science disciplines for the most part outside. The development of the field generally was also affected by the strong shift in the relative values of these social sciences—especially sociology—in relation to economics in the 1980s.

This article examines the durability of gender inequality in private law practice since Kay & Gorman published their comprehensive review in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science in 2008. We begin with some of the changes in legal practice that intensified during the Great Recession and help to contextualize women's lack of progress. We turn next to a contemporary profile of women in private practice that demonstrates empirically where women stand. We look at some of the organizational mechanisms that seem to perpetuate inequality. The challenges of integrating work and family dominated the discussion of women's lack of progress in earlier reviews of women in the legal profession and continue to matter greatly. We assume the persistence of the challenges and instead focus on ways that the mechanisms or strategies for determining compensation systematically overlook and undervalue women's contributions. We consider the different social science frameworks that explain women as overlooked and undervalued for their contributions. We conclude with proposed suggestions for changes aimed at remedying the problems discussed here. 7.1

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Abstract:The influx of women into the legal profession has significantly changed the landscape of legal practice. Women lawyers today no longer face the challenges to entering the legal profession they encountered thirty years ago. However, despite these advancements, research continues to demonstrate that there are still gender-based issues women have to face in the legal workplace. Among these issues to date are the difficulties in combining responsibilities of work with responsibilities of families and children that underpin women's employment and earning disadvantages. Using survey data from a national representative U.S. panel study of lawyers, we examine how work schedules, comparing full-time to part-time work, vary by personal disposition and workplace characteristics. Drawing from prominent explanations of gender inequality in the legal profession, we focus on inquiries of commitment to work, performance, ideal worker expectations, practice settings, and job satisfaction among dimensions of workplace characteristics and examine their effects on women and men lawyers' work schedules. Logistic regression results show that work schedules significantly vary by gender, parental role, and experience of workplace discrimination. We find that, although all parents experience types of discrimination, there are still major differences in work schedules between mothers and fathers. Our study adds to the gender debate of employment and organizations by examining quantitatively experiences of workplace discrimination.