At This Rate, We'll Get There in 2115

Stephen Bainbridge jokes to his wife that his latest column at the highly idiosyncratic site, "Tech Central Station" "guarantees that I will never be President of Harvard."

The column, titled "Legal Sex Tournaments," applies the familiar notion of viewing the path to partnership as a "promotion tournament," where the outcome is determined by ranking associate performance relative to one another, with the highest-ranking promoted.   (The use of the "tournament" metaphor has been around for quite awhile, but received its most visible boost with Marc Galanter and Tom Palay's 1991 publication of "Tournament of Lawyers.")

Wait a minute, you say?  You just saw a word on "Adam Smith, Esq." that has never appeared before (that would be "sex," for those of you who haven't been paying attention) and I'm moving right along without even alluding to what it's doing here?

No, not exactly.  The selection of that word was of course Prof. Bainbridge's, not mine, and I suppose the column would more accurately be titled "Legal Gender Tournaments," but in it Prof. Bainbridge undertakes a deadly serious enterprise, namely to come up with an explanation for the desperately lagging representation of women in BigLaw partnerships.

This gap is so wide that there's even an entire "Project for Attorney Retention" dedicated to closing it, which reports on its home page the eyecatching statistic that if you extrapolate the rate at which women increased their representation in the partnership ranks from 1996 (14.2%) to 2005 (17.2%), 50/50 parity will arrive in—2115.

Back to Prof. Bainbridge:  He finds a potential explanatory candidate for the gap in women's comparative risk-aversion vis-a-vis men.   Any number of studies in behavioral economics and kindred fields have demonstrated that men are more competitive, more aggressive, and just plain more prone to take risks than women.  For example, even controlling for the usual suspects such as age, education, wealth, etc., men are more likely than women to:

• hold financial portfolios with riskier assets;
• smoke;
• skip putting on the seat belt;
• skip blood pressure and dental checkups;
• speed, and get caught for speeding, while driving;
• work in dangerous, accident-prone occupations.

Fascinatingly, and of  greatest relevance to the "competitiveness gap" between the genders, Bainbridge picks up a National Bureau of Economic Research study from February of this year which found as follows:

"[T]he authors put 80 paid volunteers through a series of short tasks compensated either on a competitive winner-take-all or on a non-competitive piecework basis. In each trial, groups of four participants, always two women and two men, were given the job of finding the correct sum for as many sets of five two-digit numbers as they could in five minutes. The payment for the first task was awarded on a non-competitive basis by paying a piece rate of 50 cents for each correct answer. Payment for the second task was a competitive winner-take-all "tournament." Losers received nothing and the person in each group with the largest number of correct answers was awarded $2 per correct answer. For the third task, participants chose either piecework payment or the tournament compensation.

"Men and women answered the same number of problems correctly under both compensation systems. But when allowed to choose compensation rates for the third task, 75 percent of the men chose tournament compensation while only 35 percent of the women did so."

The NBER study's authors conclude:

"[T]here are "large gender differences in the propensity to choose competitive environments" and this needs to be taken into account in understanding why women are under-represented in many fields of work."

Is there any silver lining to this?  (Short of re-wiring what several millenia of evolution have apparently left us with, that is?)

One answer is to provide a "non-tournament" track, of course.

But it sounds as though The Revolution will come only when the non-tournament track is the only track.  Want to bet on seeing that within my or your working lifetimes?   I'd as soon put my money on someone, as they say out West, "who only brung his fists to a gunfight."

And I guess this post means I'm out of the running for President of Harvard, as well.