Mid-career women lawyers 20


earn 80 percent of what their male counterparts make—and the gap is even greater in large law firms, amounting to a pay disparity of $100,000 annually.


That’s according to a major


longitudinal study, After the J.D., (AJD) which found that the salary disparity begins early in


a woman’s career and widens as her career progresses.


HESE ARE PRETTY DRAMATIC FINDINGS,”


says Joyce Sterling, a law professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and one of the study’s chief researchers. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the


American Bar Foundation, the National Association for Law Placement, the NALP Foundation for Law Career Research and Education, and other sources, AJD is the first national study to track a cohort of lawyers throughout their careers. Te salary findings released earlier this year mark the


“third wave” of the AJD study. Data collection began in 2002, when a survey was given to a cohort of 9,000 lawyers in major metropolitan legal markets who had graduated from law school in 2000. Researchers followed up with those lawyers in 2007 and again in 2012. Fifty-six percent of those lawyers continued to respond to the survey ten years later. Te wage disparity began almost immediately. Two years


out of law school, women were making five percent less than men. By the second round of interviews, the income gap was 13 percent, and it grew to 20 percent by the third round, Sterling says. For lawyers in large firms, the pay disparity in 2012 was fully $100,000 per year—the differ- ence between the $290,000 average salary of men and the $191,000 average for women. “Certain practice settings have larger gaps than oth- ers,” Sterling says. “In law firms of 250 lawyers or more,


DIVERSITY & THE BAR® MAY/JUNE 2014 MCCA.COM


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