The Differential Valuation of Women's Work: A New Look at the Gender Gap in Lawyers' Incomes

This article seeks to identify the mechanisms underlying the gender wage gap among new lawyers. Relying on nationally representative data to examine the salaries of lawyers working fulltime in private practice, we find a gender gap of about 5 per-cent. Identifying four mechanisms – work profiles, opportunity paths and structures, credentials, and legal markets – we first estimate how much of the gap stems from the differential valuation of women’s endowments; second, we estimate the effects of different endowments for men and women; and third we assess both these possibilities. The analyses indicate that none of these mechanisms can fully account for the gender gap. Experimental studies that indicate women’s work is less valued and rewarded than men’s suggest new directions for research on gendered compensation. Across occupations, it is professional women who experience the largest within-job gender wage gap (Peterson and Morgan 1995). The disparity emerges quickly, with a small gender wage gap among college graduates, then widens over time (Dey and Hill 2007; Maume 2004) – so that as women’s professional careers prog-ress, they lose ground in cumulative fashion (Peterson and Saporta 2004; Valian 1998). Yet with the unprecedented numbers of women entering professional ca-reers in recent decades, the sources and the extent of this initial wage gap for the most recent cohort remain elusive. Early work attributed this persistent inequality to a comparatively small number of women in professions (Kanter 1977). However even with the recent surge in the number of women joining the professions (Spraggins 2005; Wootton 1997), it remains unclear whether this influx of women has now leveled the occupational ter-rain. Across different professions, studies indicate conflicting findings about whether the longstanding pattern of inequity is ending for these new cohorts (Bertrand an