Cape Town - Although women have made great strides in the legal profession in South Africa and their numbers have steadily increased, they still find it difficult to occupy senior positions or to become partners in law firms.
This is according to Dr Tamlynne Meyer, who recently obtained her doctorate in Sociology at Stellenbosch University.
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 to spearhead transformation in the profession.
In this regard, she asked two important questions: to what extent has the profession been feminised; and what factors impede women’s career prospects?
“Because women are the subject of South Africa’s transformation project, 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.
“Overall, the study demonstrates the challenges confronting women attorneys and the ways in which they experience marginalisation and inequality.”
As part of her doctoral research, Meyer collected the quantitative data using statistics from the Law Society’s LEAD database to conduct a descriptive and forecasting analysis using the variables of gender and race.
She interviewed female lawyers to examine the complexity of the factors that ultimately impede their career prospects and how they come to experience closure and marginalisation within the profession.
Meyer 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.
She said 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 is usually manifested through inequality, marginalisation, exclusion and elitism in taken for granted invisible, informal, complex, hidden and nuanced ways.
“It often manifests itself through the culture that the legal profession values and respects – that of being masculinised and white middle-class. 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.
“For example, these can occur in various spaces and in various ways – in tea rooms, elevators, boardrooms of law firms. It would often relate to the type of conversations lawyers have and who is 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. 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.
“The enactment of legislation and the setting of numerical targets are indeed necessary and worthwhile, as this facilitates the opening and enabling of spaces and challenges inequality.
“However, it does not lead to any radical transformation or change. Legislation, policies and targets are unable to address the ways in which social closure operates to exclude and marginalise women.”
According to Meyer, a transformative and inclusive agenda for women in the legal profession must be more imaginative than enacting legislation, policy and numeric targets.