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Stratification in the Legal Profession: Sex, Sector, and Salary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Jo Dixon  and
Carroll Seron
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Abstract

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There is a long-standing debate over the role of human and social capital in explaining the gender gap in the earnings of professionals. Expanding on current research on sex differences in the incomes of male and female lawyers, we show how the process of earnings determination varies by sex and organizational sectors differing in sex composition and bureaucratization of decision making. Using data from a random sample of lawyers, we demonstrate that the effects of human and social capital on income vary among males and among females practicing law in private, corporate and government organizational sectors of the legal profession. We also show that there are sex differences in the effects of human and social capital on income within these sectors. Together, these findings suggest that stratification processes in the legal profession are based on both sex and organizational segmentation.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , 1995 , pp. 381 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

This article is co-authored and the names are presented in alphabetical order. We are grateful to Nancy Cauthen, Paula England, Eliot Freidson, David Greenberg, Christine Harrington, Lewis Kornhauser, Richard Peterson, Robert Jackson, Jordana Pestrong, Brian Powell, Yvonne Zylan, members of the Institute for Law and Society at New York University, members of the Gender and Inequality Workshop at New York University, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. We also wish to thank Jean Kovath for her valuable research assistance and Bette Sikes for her excellent editing. The research reported here was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (#SSE-89–10544).

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