A Legal Maternal Wall? No Revolution in Motherhood for Women Lawyers in England

• Main Author: Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche et d'Etudes en Civilisation Britannique 2018-03-01
• Series: Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique
• Subjects: gender; intersectionality; legal profession; maternal wall; occupational segregation; women
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1859

In spite of significant change since their entry into the legal profession in 1922 in England and Wales, the slower progression of women on the professional ladder, their relative confinement to certain areas of the law and, consequently, the small proportion they account for in the senior judiciary remain blatant. Yet, undermining the ‘trickle-up’ argument, women now outnumber men among law students, achieve better academic results on the whole, and have made up around 50% of the profession at entry level for about twenty years: plus ça change…? The article presents a case study focusing on gender equality issues in the legal profession in England and Wales that underlines the specific weight of motherhood in the slow transformation of women’s role vis-à-vis that of men. The author implements the concept of maternal wall (Swiss & Walker, 1993), which looks at the pay gap but also at other impacts of maternity in terms of career and discrimination. Applied to the English legal profession, this sheds light on the testimonies of women barristers and solicitors who have often said they believed there was no sex discrimination, but that discrimination on the grounds of maternity was rife. On a theoretical level, this leads the author to argue for the construction of maternity and motherhood as intersectional identity facets, so as to avoid the two-fold pitfall of naturalization and essentialism. On a practical level, the hours, the specific timetable constraints, the role of clerks in chambers, etc., all contribute to a perpetuation of patriarchy in the profession. By relying on examples derived from fieldwork as well as the existing literature on the subject, the paper aims to show that in spite of an accurate statutory frame and the enforcement of internal gender equality policies in a rapidly expanding sector, the overall imbalance of power between men and women lawyers (and therefore judges) has not shifted.