Editor’s Note: In our final news story for our Big Law & Pay Equity series, Meghan Tribe speaks with current and former women law partners about how firms can go about closing the pay equity gap with the use of third-party audits by focusing performance reviews more on work product than personalities, and other measures.
“I was a star associate, star partner,” said Brenda Feis, a former Seyfarth Shaw partner who left the firm and switched sides to represent employees suing for discrimination at her own boutique employment law firm, Feis Goldy. “But once I had kids—even though I was winning cases for clients—when it came time to pass those clients on because the senior partner was retiring, they went to a male. They didn’t go to me.”
To close the gender pay gap, law firms need to bring more objectivity into how they evaluate lawyers, including by turning to outside auditors to keep them honest, Feis and other current and former women law partners said in interviews. Firms should also have women involved in compensation decisions to ward off implicit bias.
In Big Law, the gender pay gap widens as lawyers climb the ranks at large firms, with women still struggling to get full credit for their work and being sidelined for having children.
Men and women start off on fairly equal footing in hiring and pay...
She is 66 and on Original Medicare. Her latest Medicare Summary Notice (MSN) lists a $1,200 knee brace from a supplier she has never heard of. Her knees are fine and no package ever came. Medicare...