Women in Law Still Face Major Challenges - Senior Justice Outlines the Myths about Women in Law

LawFuel.com - The NZ Law News and Law Jobs Site - Male lawyers need to embrace women, in the most non-sexist, bias-busting and change-embracing manner possible. That might be said to be a part of the change necessary to break the ongoing gender-balance that would make lawyers like our first female lawyer, Ethel Benjamin, rotate in her grave.

Justice Susan Glazebrook is a stirling example of how women can succeed in law, so what's her judgment upon the current state of play? She outlined her views and the myth-busting required to get to the top and shatter that glass ceiling. She delivered the myth-busters to the Wellington branch of the women-in-law committee and the Bar Association and she began with something called "Trickle up".

1. Will weight of numbers create a 'trickle up?' Short answer: no. After 20 years of gender balancing but the gender inequality at the top end remains heavily in the chaps' favour, women at the top remaining "stubbornly low" with fewer than 20 per cent of partners in large firms being women and only 15 per cent of women QCs in the last intake. In judicial ranks, 28.4 per cent of judges over the five years until September 2009 (we don't know why Her Honour wasn't more up to date) were women.

2. The Glass Ceiling - Statistics NZ shows that after five years after completion of study, male incomes were consistently higher which studies show tends to increase as careers progress.

3. Women choose alternative paths. Both women and men choose alternative career paths, although women tend to move into inhouse and corporate jobs earlier than men, comprising 60 per cent of the inhouse jobs.

4. Motherhood. The old chestnut. Justice Glazebrook cited an MBA study of women graduates in the US that showed men still lagged behind men even when they had no children.

Read Justice Glazebrook's other four myth-busting rules here: http://www.lawfuel.co.nz/news/1103/embracing-women-the-glazebrook-myth-busting

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