Book Reviews
| Date | 01 June 1999 |
| Published date | 01 June 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00125 |
GENDER, CHOICE AND COMMITMENT: WOMEN SOLICITORS IN
ENGLAND AND WALES AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUAL STATUS
by HILARY SOMMERLAD and PETER SANDERSON
(Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998, xi and 348 pp., £42.40)
For many years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I have taught
an undergraduate seminar on the legal profession. Most of the students are
women who are headed for law school. By the time the we have covered
glass ceilings, the difficulties in balancing career and family, harassment,
bias, mentoring issues, human capital theory, the organization of practice,
and the like, their career decisions are less certain. I try to compensate by
noting that I have known many women lawyers who have managed success-
ful and fulfilling careers without sacrificing everything else in their lives. But
after reading Sommerlad and Sanderson’s Gender, Choice and Commitment,
I’m not so sure that I would take the same tack with women students in the
United Kingdom.
Gender, Choice and Commitment takes a hard look at the history, training,
and career difficulties of women solicitors in England and Wales. It is a tour
de force, seamlessly weaving economic theory, feminist theory, the sociology
of professions, others’ findings, and their own data into a powerful argu-
ment powerfully presented. The main theme is that everything about solic-
itors in England and Wales is affected in important ways by gender. Not
only obvious matters like women’s relations to the private sphere of the
family, but everything – the market for clients, the definition of commitment,
human, social, and cultural capital, legal education, job searches, shoptalk,
dress, sexuality, probably even reviews of books about the profession. For
the most part, the profession is in this awful state because it is part of,
reflects, and constitutes a society that is in this awful state. But some of the
responsibility is not derivative; lawyers seem to surpass the general popu-
lation in laddism and a commitment to commitment, which appears to me
to be, with gender typing of work, the crux of the equality problem.
Lawyers put in long hours. I suspect that this is the case throughout the
common law world. But as Gender, Choice and Commitment makes clear, it
is not only that the level of work interferes with the rest of lawyers’ lives
(family, community, sport, politics, leisure, what have you), it is also that
every woman’s willingness to make the expected effort is in doubt, regardless
of her personal behavior. Gender, Choice and Commitment is particularly
trenchant in the way that it connects the social propensity to demand that
women take primary responsibility for family life to the legal profession’s
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
252
Book Reviews
assumption that all women are vulnerable to that demand. With this
ideology as a base, no matter what the evidence in particular cases, lawyers
will characterize women in general as unwilling to make the necessary
commitment required to earn a place in the upper tier of the profession –
that is, full-fledged partnership in firms of whatever size in whatever commu-
nity women solicitors choose to practice. Sommerlad and Sanderson believe
that a solution endogenous to the profession is unlikely. As long as the larger
society has this expectation about women and family, the profession will
not experience women as having the same capacity for full professional
citizenship as men:
We would argue that the transformation of mothering (and caring in general) into a
genuinely valued, visible and socialised occupation known as parenting, is fundamental
to both achieving deep-seated professional and cultural change, and to making different
career trajectories a matter of unconstrained individual choice – for both men and women
(p. 282).
Two of the more critical obstacles that Gender, Choice and Commitment
suggests that women solicitors face is dealing with clients in the course of
practice and relating to clients as part of a marketing regime. The difficulties
arise from the natural affinity in discourse and interests that supposedly exists
between men solicitors and men clients (begging the question for the moment
about the virtual non-appearance in Gender, Choice and Commitment of
women clients). The book deals with these issues both at the level of some-
what abstract characteristics or activities (clubbability, personalist relational
capital) and the concrete (golf, boozing). So just what are the ways in which
women solicitors are disadvantaged in these aspects of client relations? To a
foreigner like me the litany included in Gender, Choice and Commitment seems
more closely to characterize the marriage between a soccer mob and a veter-
ans’ association than a learned profession. Here are the details – dirty jokes,
drinking, drinking in bars, heavy drinking, pub crawling, swearing, Round
Table, stag dinners, Masons, football, rugby, golf, golf clubs, golfdays,
go-carting, days at the races, and crude sexual banter. I trust Sommerlad and
Sanderson that this is what their respondents said and believe. It is about as
sad a commentary on cool Britannia as I have seen and I frankly doubt is
the picture that would be painted by women lawyers in the United States,
who nevertheless have plenty to complain about.
Gender, Choice and Commitment takes up the Gilligan question; that is,
how the profession has reacted to the supposed different propensities of men
and women in interpersonal relations. Gender, Choice and Commitment’s
male respondents (and thus the profession) adopt what I take to be the
conventional two-step argument. Men are inclined to be strong, dominant,
powerful, aggressive, logical, tough, and resistant to emotional issues. This
macho characterization is professionally good (although a disproportionate
amount of Gender, Choice and Commitment’s account seems to be made with
commercial and criminal work in mind). Women are inclined to be vulner-
able, intuitive, empathic, emotional, subjective, personal, and sensitive to
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© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
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