Cynthia L. Cooper, Broken Rungs on the Career Ladder: A New Analysis of Problems Encountered by Women Lawyers in Private Practice, Perspectives (Jan. 21, 2020) – “The statistics reveal a disheartening picture. In 2018, women comprised only 19.5 percent of equity partners and 30.5 percent of nonequity partners in the nation’s 200 largest firms, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL), based in Chicago. That’s only a 3 percent increase of equity partners from 12 years earlier—“a sluggish upward trajectory,” NAWL concludes. At this rate, women will achieve gender parity in equity partnerships in 160 years, according to a 2015 analysis by The American Lawyer in its Special Report: Big Law Is Failing Women.

Male partners also make substantially more money than women do. Men earned $959,000 on average, compared to $627,000 for women partners, according to the Partner Compensation Survey of 1,390 law firms released in 2018 by legal search firm Major, Lindsey & Africa. This 53 percent gap is significantly wider than the differences calculated in four previous surveys since 2010…”