While I can't pretend to be in the know about the gender politics of legal academia, an interesting study was brought to my attention by the FeministLawProfs today.  The study, the largest of its kind, found that

"[Women academics] are deeply frustrated by a system that they believe undervalues their work and denies them opportunities for a balanced life. While the study found some overt discrimination in the form of harassment or explicitly sexist remarks, many of the concerns involved more subtle “deeply entrenched inequities."

Even as somebody who is not involved in academia, I have always been keenly aware of the higher percentage of women in the non-tenure track positions and in positions of service, such as assistant deanships and counselors.  I recently had a discussion with an aspiring professor who informed me that many women take non-tenure track positions just to get their foot in the door of academia later to find out that it is nearly impossible to jump from one track to the other.  This is very similar to the track of "staff attorney" which is a non-partnership track at many large firms.  There too, it is nearly impossible to jump the tracks. 

However, the similarities between the numbers for women in academia and law firms are striking.  Believe it or not, in a statement criticizing the study, the university at which the author of the study works said this about it the progress of women on its faculty:

Women account for 43 percent of assistant professors, 37 percent of associate professors, and 22 percent of full professors. Those figures are going up in science and technology fields too, [the school] noted, and women now are 37 percent of assistant professors, 31 percent of associate professors and 18 percent of full professors in those disciplines.

Boy, this "progress" looks very similar to law firm numbers where women are 47% of junior associates and 18% of partners.  Hmmmm.

The study also highlights some core issues that I think deserve more discussion in the law firm diversity discussion as well.  They are (1) Unintended bias and outdated attitudes, (2) Devaluing positions once women hold them, (3) Service and gender (i.e. that women are given more of the "service" tasks in the organization, (4) Family vs. career, and (5) Activism vs. making it work.

  On the fourth issue, this comment hit home with me:

Women reported intense pressure — well beyond that faced by their male colleagues — with regard to having children, raising them, and also caring for aging parents. Many women reported strong reluctance to take advantage of policy options that might be helpful, fearful of how they would appear to male colleagues, and women reported regret and some dismay over choices they made to avoid confronting colleagues with their needs for more flexibility. One woman interviewed described having a child this way: “I was determined that I would drop that baby on Friday, teach on Monday, and nobody would ever know. That’s what I had to do. That was just how I felt like life had to be. Indeed, my first child was born ten days after I submitted my final grades. I did have the summer off. I went back to teach in the fall, but by that September my first book was due at the publisher, and it all got done. That’s what one had to do. That’s what I felt. I was a competitive bitch, and that was what I felt I had to do in order to make as statement about who I was.” (She added that she took a different attitude with her second child’s arrival four years later.)

So, even though plenty of women lawyers chose academia for the life-style, it seems that it is still a man's world -- not that any of us really thought differently...