This paper documents the gender gap in performance among highskilled professionals in the United States. On the basis of widely used performance measures in law firms, we find that male lawyers bill 10 percent more hours and bring in more than twice as much new client revenue as female lawyers. The differential impact across genders in the presence of young children and differences in aspirations to become a law firm partner account for a large share of the difference in performance. We show that accounting for performance has important consequences for gender gaps in lawyers? earnings and subsequent promotion.

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Ghazala Azmat and Rosa Ferrer

1 October 2017

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Journal of Political Economy 125(5) , pp.1306-1355, 2017

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DOI: 10.1086/693686

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/693686

This Journal article is published under the centre's Labour markets programme.

This publication comes under the following theme: Gender in the labour market