Search

This article provides new insights into the intersection of gender and ethnic inequalities in the solicitors' profession. Using administrative records spanning the entire population of practising solicitors in England and Wales, we analyse structural changes over successive cohorts of solicitors and identify four distinctive employment profiles: high-street solicitors, city solicitors, corporate fast-track and in-house. We show how solicitors with single or multiple characteristics associated with disadvantage are located in different employment profiles and how this changes over time. Demonstrating originality and the value of an intersectional analysis, we find that while ethnic stratification within solicitor careers decreases, stratification by gender remains constant. We find that in a period of rapid expansion, minority ethnic men become much better integrated into the most prestigious career profile in the profession – the corporate fast-track – compared with white women who are both earlier entrants to and numerically dominant in the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opinion is divided on how far and in what ways professionalism as a mode of regulation has evolved. To date, attention has focused on the impact of neoliberal political and economic ideologies that challenge the idea that professions should be trusted to regulate themselves. This article further examines the impact of these attacks on professionalism and assesses whether they have triggered a process of decline. Drawing on a range of documentary sources from the US, it suggests that, while professional modes of regulation are evolving, the dominant pattern is one of continuity. The analysis also draws attention to the path-dependent nature of professionalism and how it is associated with increasing returns for key stakeholders: producers, government regulators and employers. The article's main contribution is to highlight these trends empirically and raise questions about the accuracy and value of grand narratives that over-emphasise change and understate the self-reinforcing nature of professional modes of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intersectionality theory is concerned with integrating social characteristics to better understanding complex human relations and inequalities in organizations and societies (McCall 2005). Recently, intersectionality research has taken a categorical and quantitative turn as scholars critically adopt but retain existing social categories to explain differences in labour market outcomes. A key contention is that social categories carry penalties or privileges and their intersection promotes or hinders the life chances of particular groups and individuals. An emergent debate is whether the intersection of disadvantaged characteristics (such as female gender or minority ethnic status) produce penalties that are additive, multiplicative or ameliorative. Research is inconclusive and as yet pays little attention to moderating factors such as employer type, size, geographic location or work profile. Drawing on administrative records for individuals qualified as solicitors in England and Wales, collected by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), combined with aggregated workforce data and firm characteristics of their law firms, we undertake a statistical analysis of the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the profession with a degree of precision and nuance not previously possible. In response to calls to broaden studies of inequalities and intersectionality beyond their effect on pay or income (Castilla 2008) we focus on career progression to partnership as our key measure of success. The original contribution of our study is twofold. First, we establish statistically different profiles of law firms, showing how the solicitors' profession is stratified by gender, ethnicity and socio‐economic background, as well as the type of legal work undertaken by developing a model of socio‐economic stratification in the profession. Second, we demonstrate that while penalties tend to be additive (i.e. the sum of the individual ethnic and gender penalties) this varies significantly by law firm profile and in some situations the effect is ameliorative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]