Is it Women or the Workplace?

A couple weeks ago an interesting article appeared in the Sunday New York Times yesterday, "Why do so few women reach the top in law firms?".

The article provides various points of view as to why so few women achieve partner status in law firms. And of course, there is the broader question of why women are underrepresented at the top echelons of most organizations.

I wrote about this from a different perspective last summer (Why Corporate Culture Counts) and called attention to an excellent paper by Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a Boston-based lawyer. She led a Boston Bar Association task force tasked to study why flexible working wasn't working in the legal profession. Put simply, what she found is that the legal profession is a crucible that demands 'total commitment' to get to the top. This includes complete and utter subjugation of one's personal life to the needs of the firm. Rikleen pointed her finger directly at the 'billable hours' mentality as one of the chief drivers of the legal profession's dysfunctional culture.

In a telling excerpt from the Time's article she elaborates further on this:

"ONE of the main bugaboos in this debate — and one that analysts says is increasingly cropping up as an issue for male lawyers as well — is the billable hours regime. Billing by the hour requires lawyers to work on a stopwatch so their productivity can be tracked minute by minute — and so clients can be charged accordingly. Over the last two decades, as law firms have devoted themselves more keenly to the bottom line, depression and dissatisfaction rates among both female and male lawyers has grown, analysts say; many lawyers of both genders have found their schedules and the nature of their work to be dispiriting.

'I see a lot of people who are distressed about where the profession has gone,' Ms. Rikleen says. 'They don't like being part of a billable-hour production unit. They want more meaning out of their lives than that.'"

Regrettably most industries with their emphasis on 'process management' and 'performance based management' are heading in the same direction as the legal profession - i.e., becoming all-consumed by the same individual measurement logic. Unfortunately we can expect and are indeed already seeing the same negative consequences, not only for women, but for anyone not happy to embrace 'total commitment'.