Work Life Balance and Women at the Bar
Monday 24 February 2014 @ 10.13 a.m. | Judiciary, Legal Profession & Procedure
A recent study released by Murdoch University into work–life balance among barristers suggests we can learn much from how some successful senior women barristers negotiate male-biased cultural norms.
Women at the Bar
In Australia today, women make up an estimated 60% of all law students, but only 19% of practising barristers. Australian Women Lawyers Report that only 7.9% of practising silks (senior barristers) are women. Men tend to join the Bar earlier and have longer careers.
And women’s experiences as barristers are markedly different from men’s. Women barristers appear in court for much shorter periods than their male colleagues. They are more likely to be given a government brief than one from a private law firm and many female barristers juggle primary care responsibilities in their families alongside inflexible work schedules
Murdoch University Report Results
Both men and women in the research reported heavy reliance upon partner and wider family networks in maintaining their career. However, one woman noted that most of the male barristers she knew had very “traditional arrangements” with their partners. The few women who survived were “lucky enough” to have supportive partners.
Successful women barristers found ways to manage the tension between family priorities and a professional persona. One talked about how she carefully weighed up what information to share with solicitors and how subversion of the dominant culture is the norm when they accommodate the impact of care responsibilities on junior barristers. As mentors, female barristers' flexibility can make family life visible and counter norms around care. One silk explained:
I know that the women I work with, they’re going to do the work … if it gets done between 11pm and midnight or 1am it will be there when I open up my computer in the morning. And that’s how I always tried to work. I’d often take phone calls at the school at half past three when I was picking up the kids, but then I’d go home and settle them down and do the work.
Perhaps because there is a pressure to conform with Bar culture in order to succeed, younger junior women barristers tended to characterise such practices as “gender neutral”, with comments like “male or female, they’re all pals”. However other women described it as a “very superficial collegiality”.
These women stressed, instead, the importance of cultivating a strong female professional network of mentors and seeking out female peers. Such practices extend Bar culture in new ways. By making gender dynamics visible, they counter the cultural myth that the Bar is gender-neutral and by actively choosing to acknowledge and make time for the demands of life outside work, cultivate supportive female professional networks and mentor junior women, this may be helping to counter norms that have long kept seemingly impervious, male-biased professional cultures in place.
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