Legal News

Childless Female Lawyers Bill More than Childless Male Lawyers. Discuss.

By Dan Slater

The abstract for a recent study of 670 lawyers in Alberta, Canada, entitled “Parenthood and Productivity: A Study of Demands, Resources and Family-Friendly Firms,” draws the following conclusions (HT: Tax Prof Blog):

• Mothers with school-aged children are less productive than non-mothers, whereas fathers with preschool-aged children are more productive than non-fathers.
• Time spent on household and childcare tasks significantly reduces women’s productivity, but there’s little support for the benefits of family resources or working in a family-friendly firm for women.
• Fathers, on the other hand, seem to benefit more: family resources are positively related to their productivity and family-friendly benefits allow them more time for leisure.
• Childless female lawyers bill more hours than childless male lawyers.
• These results support the assumption that having children is negatively related to women’s productivity but challenges the belief that family-friendly policies are primarily beneficial only to mothers trying to balancing work and family.

The study, authored by two sociology professors at the University of Calgary, is reported here, and commented on here, by Carolyn Elefant at Legal Blog Watch. Challenging the study’s results, Elefant writes:

My biggest gripe with the study is that it uses hours as a proxy for productivity. . . .I’d be curious to see, for example, whether women lawyers manage to complete tasks more quickly precisely because they have less time. If that’s the case (and I suspect it is), perhaps having children makes them [more] productive, not less.

LB Readers: What say you on the study’s results, and the issue that Elefant raises?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 24, 2008 (boomark / email).