How can we better understand the scope of inequity and track its evolution?
By any metric, gender gaps are ubiquitous within senior ranks of the legal profession. Women have outnumbered men in law schools since 2016 but represent only 20% of all equity partners at multi-tier law firms, are 2 to 3 times more likely than male faculty to occupy non-tenure track and interim dean positions, and make up only 12 to 22% of those who have argued before the U.S. Supreme Court over the past decade. Yet these figures, although striking, don’t capture the full scope of the inequality. Qualitative studies consistently reveal, for instance, that female attorneys have different professional experiences than their male counterparts, exit the profession earlier, and face greater obstacles advancing in their careers.
The persistence of gender and racial inequities in the legal profession is not new, nor are questions surrounding their causes, effects, and potential solutions. But a recent article, Gender and the Social Structure of Exclusion in U.S. Corporate Law, by Afra Afsharipour and Matthew Jennejohn offers an intriguing avenue to better answers.
The article begins with an explanation of the capacity of network analysis to provide insight into how individuals and groups are differently situated. The starting point is “the simple notion that relationships among individuals, or the ‘nodes’ of a network, can be represented as connections, or ‘links,’ among them.” (P. 1830.) Accordingly, the distribution of links captures the distribution of relationships among network participants, and could thus yield information on participants’ influence, status, and access to career-advancing opportunities.
For instance, some nodes may be more central within the network than others—i.e., some nodes may have many connections to a widespread number of nodes and therefore be at the heart of a network, while others may have few connections and be relegated to the periphery. Or some nodes may be “brokers” between two clusters within a network, while other nodes may be thickly embedded within one of the two clusters. (P. 1831.)
One challenge of studying networks stands out from this explanation: what should count as a “relationship”? In the context of professional networks, advantages that could conceivably flow across a connection between two attorneys vary depending on whether, for example, they worked on the same case, worked at the same large law firm, or were both members of a bar association. Clearly mindful of this, Afsharipour and Jennejohn meticulously guide readers through the design of their analysis. Their article examines the network of Delaware Court of Chancery judges and litigators with a dataset comprising 2,769 lawyers involved with 15,077 unique civil actions from 2004 through 2020. Links are formed when lawyers work on a case together as either the assigned judge or an attorney listed on the docket for that case.
Unpacking this network reveals not only that a wide gender gap exists and persists among Chancery litigators. Afsharipour and Jennejohn’s analysis also yields nuanced insights into the disparate relationship dynamics experienced by male and female lawyers within the network. They find, for example, that women are disproportionately excluded from the “core” of the Chancery litigation network, missing out on advantages in access to information and capacity to influence doctrinal evolution. This isolation sticks over time: far more men than women are able to build dense connections over the course of their careers and maneuver to the center of the network. Moreover, the work environments of female Chancery litigators are uniformly dominated by men. Zooming in on the immediate links surrounding several well-connected female attorneys, Afsharipour and Jennejohn find distinct “sub-networks” (repeated interactions between a cluster of attorneys) that are comprised mostly of men and from which the focal attorney herself is sometimes excluded. In other words, “these women, though highly central in the overall network, are [still] on the periphery of their own personal collection of professional connections.”
Afsharipour and Jennejohn avoid the temptation to claim that their findings indicate causal or even correlative relationships between network structure and outcomes. They readily acknowledge that professional advantages are also transmitted through means not captured by their data. Instead, they modestly aim to “awaken scholarly interest” in the ways that network analysis can enrich and perhaps shift our thinking on inequity. I am confident that this terrific project will mark just the beginning of a vast research frontier.
