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The other night, I was listening to the most recent Slate Money podcast. In its second segment, the hosts talked about the recent gender pay report in the United Kingdom. They specifically mentioned about Goldman Sachs and Condé Nast, both of which, it turns out, have a pretty sizeable gender pay difference.[fn1]

There are undoubtedly many reasons why men’s income was significantly higher than women’s, but the podcast highlighted one in particular: high earners. At Goldman, women make up only 17% of the top quartile by income. At Condé Nast, there are more women at every income quartile, but it appears that incomes are skewed by the top 5%; in fact, the five-person executive committee is entirely men. What does the UK gender pay disparity have to do with Mormonism? It’ll take a couple steps to get there, but my thought process went something like this:

Gender in Legal Practice

I’m a law professor, and prior to legal academia, I was a practicing attorney at a big white shoe law firm in New York. And hearing about the lack of women at the top of Goldman Sachs and Condé Nast made me think of the law. See, legal practice has an enormous attrition of women as they rise through the ranks. Women make up just under half of law students, and receive just under half of JDs awarded.[fn2] They make up about 45% of associates.[fn3] But women only make up a hair more than 20% of partners. That is, for some reason (or, more likely, reasons) women leave law firms before making partner or without making partner.

Gender in Legal Practice in Salt Lake

I became curious about how these numbers played out in Salt Lake. Now clearly, not all attorneys in Salt Lake are Mormon, and the vast majority of Mormons in Salt Lake are not attorneys. Still, how women did in Salt Lake firms struck me as an interesting question, and not one entirely irrelevant to lived Mormonism.

In 2010, the Women Lawyers of Utah initiative did a study of precisely what I was wondering about, and the results were, well, abysmal. Similar to today, eight years ago, about 19% of law firm partners nationally were women. And in Salt Lake? That number was 11%. Of course, those numbers are eight years old, and I couldn’t find anything more recent. So I decided to look at the numbers in a tiny, not-random, not-representative sample.

Now I’m not super-familiar with the legal market in Utah—I’ve heard of a couple law firms there, but don’t know how they’re positioned. I was interested in looking at big law firms with relatively sophisticated practices, both because that’s the world I came from and because small firms risked more noise in the data. To figure out which ones, I Googled, then looked at the number of attorneys and their practice areas. I ended up deciding on six firms:

I wanted to focus solely on Salt Lake offices, so, other than Snow Christensen, where a firm had more than one office, I only looked at partners are the Salt Lake office.[fn4] Once I was looking at Salt Lake partners, I counted the number of partners who were women and the total number of partners. And how did the firms come out?

The firms I looked at still tended to fall behind the national average, but, by and large, did a lot better than the 2010 study. Here’s how these firms are doing:

S&W: 5 of 25 partners in Salt Lake ( 20% ) are women.

) are women. PBG&L: 10 of 57 ( 18% ) shareholders are women.

) shareholders are women. RQ&N: 9 of 69 shareholders ( 13% ) are women.

) are women. H&H: 9 of 47 partners ( 19% ) in Salt Lake are women.

) in Salt Lake are women. SC&M: 5 of 35 of shareholders ( 14% ) are women.

) are women. KM: 4 of 93 shareholders (4%) are women. (I had to double- and triple-check this number..)

So What to Do About It?



There are two big groups that can cause law firms to diversify: their own attorneys and their clients. The good news is, Kirton McConkie seems to recognize that having women is important. Among its associates, 15 of the 35 attorneys (43%) are women. That provides the firm with a pipeline to partnership.

Unfortunately, as the national numbers show, without active engagement, equal numbers of associates doesn’t lead to equal numbers of partners. And that’s borne out by the experience of Kirton; in the last two years, they’ve elected five new shareholders. Of those five, only one was a woman.

But there’s another side to the problem: clients. When clients demand diversity, law firms work to provide it. And guess who is one of Kirton’s major clients? The church! If the church were to exert pressure, Kirton would presumably do what it needed to advance more women, and to diversify its partnership ranks.[fn5]

It won’t be easy. It will take an active focus, not only on voting for women when the shareholder meetings happen, but on enacting policies that retain, advance, and prepare women. And the national market needs to do it. But so does the Salt Lake market, and so does the church’s external counsel.

[fn1] At Goldman, women’s mean hourly rate was 55.5% lower than men’s, while their median hourly rate was 36.4% lower. At Condé Nast, those numbers were 36.9% and 23.3% lower, respectively.

[fn2] For all of the national statistics, I’m using the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession’s January 2017 report.

[fn3] In case you’re not familiar with legal practice terminology, “associates” are basically junior and mid-level attorneys. They’re employees of the law firm, and get paid a salary. At some point, the firm allows certain attorneys to buy in, and become equity owners of the firm (which means that, at the end of the year, they share in the firm’s profits). Depending on how the firm is organized, these attorneys are either “partners” or “shareholders.” In New York, most law firms are organized as partnerships, so I always think partner. In Utah, it looks like many are organized as professional corporations, and so the equity owners are shareholders. Either way, the partners and shareholders are the senior attorneys and the higher earners.

[fn4] Snow Christensen’s website made that hard: you can filter attorneys by position or by office, but not by both, and filtering by office, I would have had to click on every name to see whether the attorney was a shareholder or not. That was more work than I was willing to do for a blog post, so my numbers for Snow include both Salt Lake and St. George attorneys.

[fn5] I’ll note that I suspect the representation of attorneys of color and of LGBT attorneys in national and in Salt Lake law firms is even worse. I didn’t look at that question because race is harder to divine from names, and sexual orientation is impossible. I will say, though, that I don’t remember seeing any persons of color among the pictures of partners I looked at; I didn’t look at pictures in every case, though, and that wasn’t the question I had, so I may have missed somebody. It’s worth noting that The Vault has data on larger national firms (though not divided by office), so I do know the national numbers for Snell & Wilmer and for Holland & Hart. Among partners at S&L, 19 of 182 (6%) are non-white, and none are openly LGBT. At H&H, 11 of 262 (4.2%) are non-white, and 2 (0.8%) are openly LGBT.