Examining Pay Differentials in the Legal Field

This study investigates pay discrimination towards women in the legal field. Recent research has shown that a pay gap does exist in the legal field, and we show that this gap widens throughout the lawyers’ early careers. For our analysis, we focus on the pay differentials between associate level men and women at large private law firms in the United States. The data used in this study is provided by the American Bar Association and is a nationally representative data set following lawyers who began their legal career in 2000. We show that women earn less than their male counterparts in 2002 and again in 2007, with a larger gap all the while maintaining statistical significance throughout the data period. We are able to show this through traditional OLS Regressions