A 53% Wage Gap? Seriously?
Fightingthe Feminist Legal Battle Since 1980
OK, I Abandoned the Movement But Occupied Corporate America; You Don’t Always Get it Right the First Time
If Men Learned Women Were Making 53% More Than Men They’d Be Tinkering with WMDS
It’s a start, ladies and gentlemen, when the voice of the AmLaw100 (the 100 richest and most powerful law firms in the nation) digs down deep into some of the reasons that the gap exists.
The story is behind a pay wall because, well, law firms can afford to pay. You can get three “free” articles a month by giving Law.com your data but I co-sign your likely lack of desire to continue being the product that social and digital media sell for profit. So I’m summarizing the important points made by the article below.
We’re Still Not Negotiating Our Compensation
Legal recruiters and yours truly bemoan the fact that women lawyers are still not negotiating their compensation. The Law.com article on women attorneys shrinking the pay gap notes that men continue to “negotiate every point of an offer, while women a lot of times will take whatever the offer is at face value.” The article continues:
[E]ven when a firm says it’s making its top offer, men will often ask for more. [Legal recruiter] Rahman said if she tells a candidate the firm won’t go higher than $200,000, women will often acquiesce, “but men will ask me to go back for $210,000.” Men will often name their desired salary early in the discussion, said Whitney Worthington, a legal recruiter at Lucas Group. “Men tend to be very straightforward and say: This is what I’m making, this is how my compensation is structured, and this is what it would take for me to move.” Women, on the other hand, often do not want to disclose their current compensation because they “tend to feel, more so than men, that they are undercompensated,” Worthington said, adding that women will often say they “are being paid below market and are not being properly valued.”
And that’s true. All women lawyers are part of the pay gap and many Gen-Y and Gen-X lawyers are suffering from low entry pay due to several recessions into which they graduated, the worst, of course, being 2008’s economic collapse. We have an answer for that of course. Re-anchor and re-frame your compensation as being below market value for whatever reason you have (or no reason at all) and set your bottom line at or in relationship to market value. 81cents.com can help you with that as can other more specific free online resources like payscale.com and Robert Half’s yearly attorney compensation benchmark reports. For in-house counsel, the Association of Corporate Counsel publishes an excellent annual report on compensation that every attorney should review before salary, bonus and equity discussions with their firms.
Make the First Proposal and Make it Reasonable but High
This is standard advice but most women are still hesitant to follow it. You can avoid “gender blow back” using objective data and opening your proposal with benefit to your employer or prospective employers (or to your partners at compensation review time). As I said at Law.com:
The candidate should begin the negotiation by communicating the benefit she offers the firm and her plan for increasing revenue, Pynchon said. If a partner has a $1 million book of business, she should explain how she will expand it through cross-marketing or developing new business. At that point, the partner should name her salary number. “Have your number in mind when you start the negotiation and make the first ask,” she advised. “You are setting an anchor. Do not let the firm make the first offer or set the value range.” Naming one’s salary number is a power move, she said. “Any number in a negotiating environment of uncertainty will draw the conversation in that direction. It will color the negotiation,” she explained. “The person making the higher ask will get more.” Pynchon, an experienced mediator with an LL.M. in dispute resolution. advises candidates to name a figure that’s a bit higher than what they actually want. “People [doing the hiring] are happier with an offer if they can negotiate some concessions,” she said.
No One Can Accurately Value their “Book” So Make it as High as Possible
My husband, a 30 year equity partner at an AmLaw100 firm, when asked how partner compensation is determined, says “throw a dart at it.” That’s cynical, but close to true. If you’re throwing a dark at it, aim for the bullseye. Most men do. As the Law.com article notes:
A partner candidate’s main negotiating leverage is a portable book of business—especially for those seeking equity status. Since no one knows for sure which clients will follow a lateral to their new firm or how much work they will generate, book value is subjective–and there is room to negotiate.
The male respondents in the MLA survey had higher-value books of business on average than the female ones—even for respondents with similarly-sized books, 80% of women partners reported lower compensation.
Some women may understate the value of their book while men tend to overstate it. “It’s as if men are giving the number of what they want their book to be or what it could be, instead of what is actually there,” Rahman said. Morris Manning & Martin’s internal recruiter, Lauren Stone, said male partner candidates tend to assign a higher value to their portable business—perhaps $2 million—versus, say, $900,000 by a female candidate. But it’s unclear whether men are overvaluing their books, or just have more business, she said. “Until we hire them, it’s hard to know.”
Stone added [that her firm’s] lateral candidate[s] must have a portable book, ideally worth at least $750,000 in key practices such as corporate tech or real estate. That said, she has received resumes from male partner candidates with only $200,000 in business.
Partner compensation isn’t just based on book value, Pynchon said. Internal politics, such as how much partners may need the candidate’s services and their power in the firm, factor into compensation decisions, she said, so it’s important to negotiate directly with a firm’s decision-makers instead of external recruiters. “The people who need your services—and have been doing without those services—are the ones who will be motivated to get you more money,” she said. “A lateral of sufficient quality—who has ambition, takes initiative and is a really good lawyer—is not easy to find.”