March 19, 2006
Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?
HUNDREDS of feet above Manhattan, the reception area of Proskauer Rose's headquarters boasts all of the muscular, streamlined ornamentation that symbolizes authority and power in a big city law firm — modern art, contemporary furniture, white marble floors, high ceilings and stunning views. The background music floating about this particular stage set is composed of the steady, reassuring cadences of talented, ambitious lawyers greeting their clients.
Bettina B. Plevan, a 60-year-old specialist in labor and employment law, has spent more than three decades at Proskauer navigating the professional riptides and intellectual cross-currents of firm life on her way to reeling in one of the legal world's most storied and most lucrative prizes: a partnership. Her corner office has evidence of the hard work that has gotten her here: stacks of legal documents sprout like small chimneys on her desk and floor, amid rows of black binders and brown accordion folders.
Compact, sharp-minded and direct, Ms. Plevan occasionally allows a knowing, engaging grin to wrap itself around her sentences as she shares her reasons for pursuing a partnership.
"I decided I wanted to be a partner shortly after I got here — by nature I have a lot of drive, I'm competitive and I have a lot of energy," she says. "For me, being a partner was a way in which my talents and skills could be recognized. And I wanted that recognition."
Ms. Plevan has that recognition. Besides the handsome salary and bragging rights accompanying the grueling hours and emotional juggling that constitute a partnership, she has earned ample plaudits from peers outside Proskauer. According to a small plaque, one among many stacked along her window, other lawyers around the country have voted her one of the "Best Lawyers in America" in each of the last 13 years.
Following in the footsteps of Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, Whitney North Seymour Jr. and Cyrus R. Vance, Ms. Plevan is president of the New York City Bar Association, only the second woman to hold that position since the organization's founding in 1870. She has a job that makes her happy and reflects her sense of herself. She is an accomplished lawyer. She has arrived.
She also is an anomaly.
Although the nation's law schools for years have been graduating classes that are almost evenly split between men and women, and although firms are absorbing new associates in numbers that largely reflect that balance, something unusual happens to most women after they begin to climb into the upper tiers of law firms. They disappear.
According to the National Association for Law Placement, a trade group that provides career counseling to lawyers and law students, only about 17 percent of the partners at major law firms nationwide were women in 2005, a figure that has risen only slightly since 1995, when about 13 percent of partners were women.
Even those who have made it to the top of their profession say that the data shows that women's legal careers involve distinct, often insurmountable hurdles and that those hurdles remain misunderstood or underexamined.
"You have a given population of people who were significantly motivated to go through law school with a certain career goal in mind," says Ms. Plevan, who notes that Proskauer has always provided her with a welcoming professional home. "What de-motivates them to want to continue working in the law?"
FOR years, one pat response to that question was that once law school graduation rates substantially equalized between men and women, that pipeline would fuel firm diversity and cause partnerships to equalize as well. Yet the pipeline has been gushing for about two decades and partnership disparity remains.
Although women certainly leave firms to become more actively involved in child-rearing, recent detailed studies indicate that female lawyers often feel pushed into that choice and would prefer to maintain their careers and a family if a structure existed that allowed them to do so. Some analysts and many women who practice law say that having children isn't the primary reason most women leave law firms anyhow; most, they say, depart for other careers or for different ways to practice law.
"Firms want women to stay. Men at the firms want women to stay, and women want to stay. So why aren't they?" asks Karen M. Lockwood, a partner at Howrey in Washington. "Law firms are way beyond discrimination — this is about advancement and retention. Problems with advancement and retention are grounded in biases, not discrimination."
With law firms courting major corporations that demand diversity within the ranks of those advising them, and with women increasingly dominating the top tiers of law school graduates, veteran lawyers say that promoting women's legal careers is not just a matter of goodwill or high-mindedness. It's also a winning business strategy.
"Forget about skin color or gender or whatever, if you want to run a great business, you need great, talented people. And I don't care if I'm hiring Martians if it makes good business sense," says Michael M. Boone, a founding partner of Haynes and Boone in Dallas. "Even the largest firms are at risk if they don't do this."
When Ms. Plevan graduated magna cum laude from Boston University Law School in 1970, only about 9 percent of the students who earned law degrees nationwide were women. That number had been creeping up slowly since 1960, and began to soar just a few years after she graduated. Women began penetrating the profession even though it was still largely enmeshed in discriminatory educational and hiring practices.
Ms. Plevan's husband, Kenneth A. Plevan, was a military lawyer, and after she earned her law degree the couple moved to Seattle, where he had an Air Force posting. She joined a Seattle firm, becoming the first woman it had ever hired. Four years later, the couple moved to New York.
She had attended Boston University in part because it had a large number of female faculty members; Ms. Plevan evaluated job prospects in Manhattan through the same lens. Proskauer appealed to her because the firm had had a female partner in 1974 — a rarity at the time — and because, she said, it was "pretty clear that this was a firm open to women."
Ms. Plevan said that male partners at Proskauer had worked actively as her mentors. "I was given opportunities to be the lead lawyer and demonstrate what I could do professionally very early here," she recalls. "I think the opportunity to prove yourself is part of what puts someone on the partnership track. Of course, you have to seize the opportunity as well."
Proskauer anointed Ms. Plevan as a partner in 1980, shortly before law firms around the country began embarking on a broad consolidation wave that transformed the profession. Large firms became even larger; expanded their global reach and practice areas; focused more tightly on benchmarks such as "billable hours" to assess the performance of individual lawyers; and competed voraciously for coveted spots in news media reports that ranked them by financial yardsticks such as profit per partner. Those forces gained momentum in the 1990's and continue today.
Women entering this environment discovered that men enjoyed some distinct advantages, largely deriving from the simple facts that there were more men in most firms and that they had their hands on the levers of power. Although Ms. Plevan benefited from strong male mentoring, most women who practice law do not, according to analysts and female lawyers. Women lawyers also enjoy less access to the networking and business development opportunities that flourish in largely male playgrounds — think golf courses or football games — or through an invitation for a casual after-work drink with a male boss.
"Women aren't being adequately mentored, but I think male associates aren't particularly well mentored at all firms either, and there's pretty widespread dissatisfaction with that," said Meredith Moore, director of the office for diversity at the New York City Bar. "Having said that, I do think that superstar male associates are identified more clearly for informal mentoring than superstar female associates."
Some of this give-and-take enters gray areas that may have as much to do with caution as it does with biases. Is a male boss reluctant to invite a younger female lawyer out for a drink because water cooler chatter might spark rumors of an affair or give rise to a sexual harassment suit? Is a female associate hesitant to address a male partner informally in a hallway because it will be derided as flirting?
Still, the sexes have been mingling in the workplace for some time now, and professionals, in all their adaptational glory, have found ways to manage these situations. Anyhow, female lawyers say, why is a woman who hunts down her male boss for a chat seen as overly aggressive or possibly flirtatious, while a male doing the same thing is seen as merely ambitious?
Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a 52-year-old partner in the Framingham, Mass., office of the Worcester, Mass., firm of Bowditch & Dewey, details the hurdles facing female lawyers in her recently published book "Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women's Success in the Law" (Thomson Legalworks, $25). In her book she writes that law firms need to reorganize if they want to encourage and retain women as partners, and that roadblocks — whether they be errant mentoring, opaque networking opportunities, low-grade case assignments or arbitrary male control of key management committees — should all be reviewed.
"Law firms like to talk about running the firm like a business and looking at the numbers, but they're running on an institutional model that's about 200 years old," she says. "Most law firms do a horrible job of managing their personnel, in terms of training them and communicating with them."

March 9, 2006
Brazilian Farm Workers Damage Plantation
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:09 a.m. ET
SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) -- About 2,000 highly organized farm workers invaded a plantation owned by a big Brazilian paper and pulp company Wednesday, uprooting saplings and destroying a laboratory in an environmental rampage against mass eucalyptus tree cultivation, the company and the protesting group said.
The protesters, mostly women with Brazil's branch of the international Via Campesina farm workers rights group, occupied the plantation about 700 miles south of Sao Paulo before dawn, overpowered security guards and left after causing damage that could cost the company millions of dollars, Aracruz Papel e Celulose SA said in a statement.
Via Campesina said it organized the invasion ''to denounce the social and environmental impact of the growing green desert created by eucalyptus monoculture'' in Latin America's largest country. The raid was timed to coincide with International Women's Day.
A top government official criticized the invasion.
''Material that was being made in order to improve peoples' lives was completely destroyed,'' said Agrarian Reform Minister Miguel Rossetto.
The women left the plantation about an hour after they occupied it, and no one was hurt or injured, said group spokesman Igor Felipe.
In a manifesto published on Via Campesina's Web site, the group claimed that increasing cultivation of trees to make paper is forcing poor farmers from their land, causing pollution and creating health problems.
''We are against green deserts, the enormous plantations of eucalyptus, acacia and pines for cellulose, that cover thousands of hectares in Brazil and Latin America,'' the statement said. ''When the green desert advances, biodiversity is destroyed, soils deteriorate, rivers dry up.''
The company denounced the invasion as an attack against the company, the nation's paper and pulp sector and Brazil's internationally renowned agribusiness.