Women continue to it difficult to occupy senior positions, or to become partners in law firms in South Africa, even though big strides have been made to employ more women in the profession.
This is according to a study by Dr Tamlynne Meyer, who recently obtained a doctorate in Sociology at Stellenbosch University.
“It often manifests itself through the culture that the legal profession values and respects – that of being masculinised and white middle class,” she said in a statement.
Meyer looked at how and why women attorneys, particularly black female attorneys, continue to be marginalised, despite the removal of formal barriers and the enactment of legislation and policies for transformation in the profession.
She asked two questions in the study: to what extent has the profession been feminised, and what factors impede women’s career prospects?
“My study considers the materiality of their everyday lives as they encounter and experience being an attorney in a historically white male-dominated middle-class profession,” said Meyer.
Meyer collected data using statistics from the Law Society’s database using the variables of gender and race. She interviewed female lawyers to examine the factors that impede their career prospects and how they come to experience closure and marginalisation within the profession.
She said her study sheds light on the gendered organisational, social, and cultural factors that impact the experiences of women attorneys, thereby enabling social closure and giving rise to the white male-dominant profession.
Social closure refers to the way in which social groups enact boundaries and exert power and influence so that the resources, opportunities, and privileges are only available to a select few.
This was usually manifested through inequality, marginalisation, exclusion and elitism taken for granted in invisible, informal, complex, hidden and nuanced ways.
“Hence, all the privileges, social, cultural and economic capital of the white middle class is valued and respected. And those who cannot or do not conform to this idealised culture become excluded in several ways – often very subtle, hidden and implicit,” she said..
For example, these could occur in various spaces and ways — in tea rooms, elevators, and boardrooms of law firms. And would often relate to the type of conversations lawyers have and who was allowed to engage in such conversations.
“In other instances, it may involve who gets invited to the firm’s social events and informal business trips. And by not being able to engage and attend invites means limited networking opportunities, which is vital to an attorney’s career progress. Hence, women become excluded, lose out on networking opportunities, and their career opportunities are diminished.”
Meyer said women’s increased presence in the profession currently does not translate to their having a voice to facilitate any meaningful change.
This was because they did not occupy positions of power, which provided them with authority to add voice, and due to a culture that silenced women’s voices in the profession.
Meyer said meaningful transformation in the profession needed to be more than just meeting legislation and numeric targets, even though these targets were necessary and worthwhile.
“To facilitate meaningful change, we need to understand and interrogate how these are produced, maintained and reproduced. We have to engage with subjective experiences of female lawyers, gender, racial and class regimes, how they interact with professional cultures and practices, and societal perceptions and expectations placed on different groups.
“We also need to address perceptions and attitudes of attorneys, management, clients and women themselves, as they are central to foster transformation of the profession,” she said.