Stephen Bainbridge jokes
to his wife that his latest column at the highly idiosyncratic
site, "Tech Central Station" "guarantees that I will never be President
of Harvard."
The column, titled "Legal
Sex Tournaments," applies the familiar notion of viewing the
path to partnership as a "promotion tournament," where the outcome
is determined by ranking associate performance relative to one another,
with the highest-ranking promoted. (The use of the "tournament"
metaphor has been around for quite awhile, but received its most visible
boost with Marc Galanter and Tom Palay’s 1991 publication
of "Tournament
of Lawyers.")
Wait a minute, you say? You just saw a word on "Adam Smith,
Esq." that has never appeared before (that would be "sex," for those
of you who haven’t been paying attention) and I’m moving right along
without even alluding to what it’s doing here?
No, not exactly. The selection of that word was of course
Prof. Bainbridge’s, not mine, and I suppose the column would more
accurately be titled "Legal Gender Tournaments," but
in it Prof. Bainbridge undertakes a deadly serious enterprise, namely
to come up with an explanation for the desperately
lagging representation of women
in BigLaw partnerships.
This gap is so wide that there’s even an entire "Project
for Attorney Retention" dedicated to closing it, which reports on its home page
the eyecatching statistic that if you extrapolate the rate at which
women increased their representation in the partnership ranks from
1996 (14.2%) to 2005 (17.2%), 50/50 parity will arrive in—2115.
Back to Prof. Bainbridge: He finds a potential explanatory
candidate for the gap in women’s comparative risk-aversion vis-a-vis
men. Any
number of studies in behavioral economics and kindred fields have
demonstrated that men are more competitive, more aggressive, and
just plain more prone to take risks than women. For example,
even controlling for the usual suspects such as age, education, wealth,
etc., men are more likely than women to:
- hold financial portfolios with riskier assets;
- smoke;
- skip putting on the seat belt;
- skip blood pressure and dental checkups;
- speed, and get caught for speeding, while driving;
- work in dangerous, accident-prone occupations.
Fascinatingly, and of greatest relevance to the "competitiveness
gap" between the genders, Bainbridge picks up a National Bureau of
Economic Research study from February of this year which found
as follows:
"[T]he authors put 80 paid volunteers through a series of short
tasks compensated either on a competitive winner-take-all or on
a non-competitive piecework basis. In each trial, groups of four
participants, always two women and two men, were given the job
of finding the correct sum for as many sets of five two-digit numbers
as they could in five minutes. The payment for the first task was
awarded on a non-competitive basis by paying a piece rate of 50
cents for each correct answer. Payment for the second task was
a competitive winner-take-all “tournament.” Losers
received nothing and the person in each group with the largest
number of correct answers was awarded $2 per correct answer. For
the third task, participants chose either piecework payment or
the tournament compensation."Men and women answered the same number of problems correctly
under both compensation systems. But when allowed to choose compensation
rates for the third task, 75 percent of the men chose tournament
compensation while only 35 percent of the women did so."
The NBER study’s authors conclude:
"[T]here are “large
gender differences in the propensity to choose competitive environments” and
this needs to be taken into account in understanding why women
are under-represented in many fields of work."
Is there any silver lining to this? (Short of re-wiring what
several millenia of evolution have apparently left us with, that is?)
One answer is to provide a "non-tournament" track, of course.
Maybe the handful of firms that have or are moving in this direction intuited
something that the behavioral economics labs are only coming around
to now.
But it sounds as though The Revolution will come only when the non-tournament
track is the only track. Want to bet
on seeing that within my or your working lifetimes? I’d
as soon put my money on someone, as they say out West, "who only
brung his fists to a gunfight."
And I guess this post means I’m out of the running for President of Harvard, as well.
