Scenes from the class(room) struggle

Lauren Rivera, author of the interesting and important book Pedigree, has just published a study with Andras Tilcsik  that offers a fascinating glimpse into the way class and gender dynamics interact in the creation of elite professionals.

R&T designed an experiment in the context of the hiring of summer associates by large law firms.  With trivial exceptions, working for a large firm after the second year of law school is pretty much the only way to get a partner-track associate position with such a firm.  The vast majority of summer associates at prestigious (i.e., market-paying) law firms are hired through the on-campus interviewing process at a small group of elite and semi-elite law schools.

For the 90% of law students who don’t attend such schools, on campus interviewing provides few or no opportunities for entry into big law, since at best only a handful of large firms will interview at their institutions.  Students at these schools who want to pursue an entry-level big law job have to send their resumes directly to firms — an approach which, given the nature of the hiring process, has a very low success rate.

R&T’s study took advantage of this process by creating four resumes, belonging to four fictitious law students.  Each of the four was in the top 1% of his or her class at a respectable but decidedly non-elite law school, and each had graduated summa cum laude from college.  Each had the same impressive work experience.  (The precise law school and undergraduate institution for the candidates varied, depending on the location of the law firms being solicited.  This is because many non-NYC large firms are sensitive to “ties,” i.e., they don’t want to hire and train somebody with no ties to the region, because they see such hires as flight risks, who may leave for their home region just as they start to become profitable a couple of years into their careers).

The variables distinguishing the four candidates were class and gender.  Gender was signaled by first names (James and Julia).  Class was signaled by multiple variables, specifically last name (Cabot v. Clark), whether the candidate had received need-based financial aid as an undergraduate, whether the candidate had mentored either first-year undergraduate students or first generation college students, whether the candidate had been on the college’s sailing or track and field team, and, most ingeniously, by “taste” distinctions, in Bourdieu’s sense, in regard to the candidates’ listed hobbies and interests (polo and classical music v. pick-up soccer and country music).

Note: R&T tested their design via crowd-sourcing to explore what unmarked categories respondents were likely to attribute to these candidates.  This revealed all four candidates were likely to be assumed to be white, heterosexual, and childless, even though the resumes featured no overt information regarding these categories.

The four resumes (upper class man, lower class man, upper class woman, lower class woman) were then submitted to large firms.

The results were striking.

R&T report that the upper class man was nearly thirteen times more likely to receive a callback than the otherwise identical lower class man (13 of 80 resumes in the former category garnered a callback as opposed to one [!] of 78 resumes in the latter).

Their results become even more intriguing when gender dynamics are taken into account.  While perceived class status produced an enormous boost in hiring prospects for the upper class man, it seems to have the opposite effect for the upper class woman.   The upper class woman received just three callbacks in 79 applications, i.e., she was more than four times as likely to be rejected as her otherwise identical upper class male counterpart.

Indeed, the lower class woman received nearly twice as many callbacks (five) as her upper class twin, and five times as many as the lower class man.

R&T conducted followup interviews with lawyers to help interpret these results.  They found, not surprisingly, that the “lower-class candidates were perceived as less compatible with the culture and clients of large law firms.”

This is a striking example of how amorphous criteria such as a a candidate’s perceived “fit” with “the institutional culture” is basically shorthand for straight-up class bias in hiring decisions.

This explains why the lower-class candidates as a group did much worse than the higher-class candidates as a group, but of course it flies in the face of the more granular fact that the upper-class woman did so poorly — almost as badly as the lower class man, and more poorly than the lower-class woman.

The explanation here, per R&T’s interview informants, is that large law firms don’t like to hire upper class women because such women are perceived as having “options” that aren’t available to men or lower-class women. R&T summarize this view as concerns about the “commitment” of upper class women to the often highly unpleasant working conditions in large firms (relatively speaking of course: unpleasant relative to some other white collar environments, not unpleasant in comparison to cleaning out toilets at a Motel 6 or shingling roofs in San Antonio in July).  This concern about commitment is closely tied to assumptions about the “intensive mothering” that is expected of upper-class women in American society.  Quoting now at length from R&T (the italicized text are quotes from their interviewees):

Yet by far the most striking difference was how our respondents described the commitment level of the higher-class woman versus other applicants. Almost all believed she, unlike other candidates, might be an attrition risk. John expressed concerns about her commitment to legal practice:

Does this person really want to be a lawyer? Did this person go to law school as a default or because they couldn’t think of anything else to do? People who go to law school as a default or don’t really think about the law as in terms of practicing are the most vulnerable to leaving the profession. And particularly in a firm environment—it’s a difficult environment—you have to really want to do it, even if you’re gonna last just a couple years.

More commonly, respondents worried that the higher-class woman might leave paid employment entirely. Viewing her through stereotypes of marriage and family, they described her as potentially “looking for a husband” or “biding time” until she would leave the law to “become a stay-at-home mom.” Respondents had a very different reaction to the lower-class woman, whose commitment they did not question. They believed she was “hungry,” and, unlike the higher-class female, would “work hard for the money” over many years because she had “law school debt to pay” and would have “mouths to feed.”

In fact, when we told participants about the main finding from our audit study, the most common reaction was to spontaneously mention a bias against higher-class women, which many (but not all) had personally observed in their firms.¹⁷ Some, like Betsy, described this bias in terms of general societal expectations of affluent men and women:

An upper-class man is always going to be working. He’s always gonna stay in the workforce, and chances are he’s well connected, and that might be a good person to have at your firm. But an extremely upper-class woman, she might have all of the sort of like entitled asshole issues the guy does, plus you add in the fact that she might not take the job that seriously. . . . There’s not the same societal pressure on women to work and to have some sort of high-earning job.

Others described how the intensive, all-consuming nature of work in law firms exacerbated such class-based stereotypes of women’s labor force participation. Bob, for example, mentioned how women from privileged social backgrounds, who were not reliant on a law firm for income, might be less committed to the grueling lifestyle of large law firms:

This is the question we always ask ourselves, really. Why would you do this job if you didn’t have to, right? Like if you had another option, if you could do anything, if you could live the lifestyle that this job provides but you didn’t actually have to put in the work involved, I’m not sure that I would do it. And so I think people look at women from affluent backgrounds or classes—if they come from money or if they’re marrying into money—because they already live in that strata [sic] and ask that question.

Outside resources, combined with expectations of intensive mothering among privileged women (Hays 1996; Lareau 2003), contributed to a perception among some decision-makers that hiring a higher-class woman was not always worth the risk. Joy described a negative perception of higher-class women she observed while working on her firm’s hiring committee: “There’s . . . a sense that these women don’t really need this job. ’Cause they have enough money or they are married to somebody rich and they should be, you know, they’re going to end up being a helicopter mom. They’re eventually going to leave law.” Adam expressed a similar sentiment:

As R&T note, these sorts of superficially plausible concerns run up against the reality that associate attrition rates at large law firms are extremely high for both women and men:  The majority of associates last four years or less, and perhaps one in ten are still around after seven years.  But of course social reality is one thing and social prejudice is another.

I’ll have more to say about some of the implications of Rivera’s and Tilsick’s study in another post.