Alexis, a 31-year-old attorney at a mid-sized politically conservative law firm in Detroit, was working on two deals when a male partner she hadn’t met before called her up and asked if she was getting weepy.

“I want to make sure you aren’t running into Elise’s office crying every morning,” Alexis said he told her. “Is everything ok?”

Alexis was stunned, and confused. She and Elise, another female associate (both names are pseudonyms), weren’t close nor were they working on the same cases; there was no indication that anything was wrong with either employee. They’d been working hard, long hours just like all lawyers at their firm.

“It was this presumption that I’m not handling it, and that my reaction would be to go cry to the other girl up the hall,” Alexis said. “Which I have never heard anyone ask a male associate.”

That’s just one example, Alexis said, of how she feels routinely condescended to, undercut, and devalued in the office, especially by her Republican-leaning male superiors. “If you have half a brain as a young female associate, you look around and you know there is no path for success,” Alexis said. Of 50-something partners in her department, just three are female.

According to a new study, Alexis’s experience may not be an outlier: female lawyers, the study found, are promoted less often, are less likely to be selected to work on certain client teams, and are more likely to leave their law firms when their male superiors are politically conservative and donate to Republicans. Women who work under politically liberal, Democrat-donating bosses don’t see the same penalties.

If you have half a brain as a young female associate, you look around and you know there is no path for success Alexis (pseudonym)

Conservative bosses, women report anecdotally, are indeed harder to work with, and conservative workplaces less favorable to female lawyers’ professional development. Most of the challenges don’t come in the form of obvious, outright discrimination – there’s little of the Mad-Men-style ass-grabbing or blatant disparate treatment – but rather, male associates are given subtle advantages in mentorship, professional opportunities, informal communications, and even compensation.

At Alexis’s firm, the young male associates and the young male partners are on informal email chains and group texts, staying in constant communication with each other. The more experienced male partners are able to offer the newer lawyers important tips and bits of knowledge about long-time clients, something female associates, who aren’t part of the group communications, don’t get.

“These long-standing relationships yield a lot of institutional knowledge,” Alexis said. “If you aren’t privy to this back-channeling information, you constantly step on land mines, and there’s no way you could have known unless someone helped you out and told you. Decades of institutional knowledge – there’s not enough effort in the world that can help you overcome that.”

The politics of gender

Seth Carnahan, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor who conducted the survey with Brad Greenwood, an assistant professor at Temple University, emphasized that the findings are only a correlation, not a causation. The fact that conservative men in charge meant fewer women promoted and retained could be caused by the bosses or by the employees, Carnahan said.

“We cannot rule out the idea that women who are more interested in getting ahead in their careers are selecting jobs where they’re working with more liberal male partners,” he said. Still, the weight of the research on inequality in the workplace suggests that it’s managers, not subordinates, who have a strongest hand in pulling women up the career ladder – or pushing them down the rungs.

“On the partner side, it’s possible that a partner’s political ideology might be influencing the culture they create in the organization and also the way they think about the promotion of female associates,” Carnahan said. “There’s a lot of work in political science that suggests a conservative political ideology is associated with relatively traditional views about gender roles.”

Indeed, according to the General Social Survey, which examines American attitudes and beliefs about a slew of issues, conservative men are significantly more likely than their liberal counterparts to say that the best family set-up is one in which women stay home with the children and men are the primary breadwinners. If you’re a woman working for a boss with that perspective, it’s perhaps not surprising that you wouldn’t be mentored, or that your career wouldn’t be treated as seriously as the guy’s down the hall.

“It’s possible that because conservatives have these traditional beliefs about gender roles in the family, they might think that their female associates are more likely to quit and raise children, so they’re less likely to invest in them,” Carnahan said.

I feel like Republican men slot women into two places ... at home as wives taking care of the family, or sex objects Claire (pseudonym)

That’s exactly what Claire (a pseudonym), a 33-year-old attorney at a mid-sized firm in Manhattan run by a prominent Republican donor, sees in her office.

“I feel like Republican men slot women into two places: They should be at home as wives taking care of the family, or they’re sex objects,” she said, noting that attractive young female associates are treated well at her firm in terms of being invited to client events and sitting in on meetings. But, she said, that’s not the same as treating them like employees with a future at the firm.

“Attractive women are viewed as people [the male partners] want around for social events and client events, but they aren’t viewed as a long-term investment in terms of how do we train them, how do we keep them here. I’ve heard comments about women who get pregnant – one woman took six months of leave and there were comments about how anyone who takes that kind of leave isn’t serious.”

For men, not only are the investments in their careers different in conservative workplaces, but so too are the expectations around work and family. Men don’t have to contend with the stereotype that they’re either single and therefore sexually available, or they’re mothers and therefore inadequate employees who should be at home with their children.

“I used to work with a guy who would put up pictures of his daughter all over his door, he was so proud of her,” Claire said. “Another man who made partner, he was very open about, ‘I have to make it to all of my daughter’s school things and parent-teacher conferences.’ He would leave, even if it was very inopportune for the team. If a man does that, he’s viewed as being a really great dad, and look at him finding that work-life balance. Whereas if a woman does it, she is immediately viewed as not serious, not dedicated to the job.”

The imbalances aren’t so obvious, many female lawyers say, when they work for more liberal bosses, whether they’re male or female. In a previous job under a politically progressive male boss, “There was complete confidence in my work product,” Alexis said. “They started from a position of assuming that I was right and my work product was good. Whereas now it’s almost reflexive to criticize or tell me I’m wrong.”

In Claire’s office, liberal lawyers are a relative rarity, and they stay quiet about their political views. But she said it was striking to notice that “the two male partners who have taken the greatest interest in my career and helping to train me, and are not the partners who I necessarily did the most work for, are both liberal”.

Examining biases

Promotion and retention of female lawyers are ongoing challenges in the legal field. Women have made up close to half of law students since the early 1990s, and about half of first and second-year associates – entry-level lawyers at law firms – are women. Still, two decades after women achieved near-parity in law schools, only 4% of managing partners at the top 200 American law firms are women. Women make up just 17% of equity partners at law firms generally.

Linda (also a pseudonym) recently left the mid-sized midwestern boutique firm she worked at for nearly a decade after a conservative Evangelical Christian man took over as managing partner when a “tough as nails” Democrat-voting woman retired. The firm, which was once one third women, dropped to having just one female associate and one female partner: Linda herself. The firm culture, which before had been collaborative and civil, shifted dramatically.

“It became much more authoritarian, much more top-down, we’re gonna do it this way because I say so – which also falls into that notion of dad being in charge,” Linda said. “I never saw my career path take as much of a nosedive as when this conservative man took over.”

I never saw my career path take as much of a nosedive as when this conservative man took over Linda (pseudonym)

For law firms, one solution might be to encourage male partners and associates to check their own biases and stereotypes. Carnahan, the author of the study, said he hopes it will push men to think, “Is there something I’m doing that I’m not conscious of? Do I have a subconscious bias in terms of my hiring decisions, my training, my promotion decisions?”

He said that he hopes “maybe seeing this kind of data could help people examine their own beliefs and how that might be impacting their subordinates”.

But if a man already believes that women are better off at home with the kids, it’s hard to imagine he’ll be persuaded to change by a survey indicating he may be the kind of boss who will stymie women’s careers. And for women, there are no good solutions if your boss is treating you unfairly. Even going to HR about blatantly bad behavior, said Alexis, can backfire.

“Once they get talked to by HR about a certain behavior or incident, what a lot of the partners end up doing is just stop talking to that female associate,” she said. “So she gets less work and it ends up hurting her.”

To succeed at her firm, Claire said, women have to hide the parts of themselves that make them identifiably female, such as being a mother. The conservative view of women as either sex objects or mothers, she said, “requires women, if they want to make partner at a firm like this, basically quote-unquote ‘be one of the guys.’ That means you don’t know they have children, and they’re always available.”

What, I asked Claire, would she need to personally do to thrive as a woman in her conservative workplace? Forgo having children? Work twice as hard as the guys?

“It’s hard for me to answer that,” she said after a long pause. “Because I just don’t feel like I have a future here.”