Large law firms: The last dinosaurs in the gender issue
Reading time: 3 min.
|Hardly anywhere else have so few women reaching the top as in major law firms. Yet there have long been more female lawyers than male lawyers. On the mysterious disappearance of top female talent.
Perhaps we should put out a collective search report: Hundreds of top female lawyers are missing – excellently trained, highly committed, extremely well-connected – and have now vanished without a trace. Where are they? This is a well-kept secret of the large law firms that are so concerned with discretion that they have created a kind of parallel universe to the average German working world within the German economy. There , "greedy jobs" are awarded, as Nobel Prize winner in economics Claudia Goldin once called the work of law firm lawyers. In other words, jobs for which exceptionally high salaries are paid in exchange for exceptional availability. The goal is to maximize - last Anglicism, I promise - "billable hours," i.e. working hours that are billed to the client. There is no skimping here.
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