Canadian Lawyer

16 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 7 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m It seems different now. Canadian women are CEOs, sit on corporate boards, are ministers of the Crown. Four of the nine Supreme Court of Canada judges are women. Some say women are eclipsing men in the workplace (and elsewhere). A recent popular book was entitled The End of Men. In 2013, participants in Toronto's Munk Debate argued over the topic "Be it resolved men are obsolete..." There's a lot of hand waving about gen- der equality, but what's the truth of the matter? Start poking around and suddenly things don't look so great. In April 2016, it was reported by Catalyst, a not-for-profit organization that tries to expand opportu- nities for women, that there was just one female CEO in the TSX 60, a group of 60 large Canadian companies (she's Dawn Farrell of TransAlta Corporation). In 2014, women's share of board seats in the TSX 60 was 20.8 per cent. Only 26 per cent of federal MPs are women (and that's a record number). In 2015, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada no. 30 when it came to the status of women, down from no. 19 the year before (a growing wage gap was part of the explanation for the downgrade). And what about women lawyers? The good news, first of all, is that there are a lot of them, and the number and percentage are increasing. Catalyst reports that across Canada there are now more new women lawyers than men. It's a far cry from the days, not so long ago, when a woman in a law school class or a courtroom was an oddity. But the story of women in law does not end with the call to the bar. Many more women than men leave legal practice, often early on in their career. About 10 years ago, the Law Society of Upper Canada, alarmed by this trend, created something called the Retention of Women in Pri- vate Practice Working Group. The working group noted that retention was a problem largely because private practice has not adapted to women's realities, such as child- birth. The group commissioned a change of status study of the three-year period 2010 to 2012, and found that during those ow does the Canadian legal profession treat women lawyers? They should have exactly the same opportunities as men lawyers. But do they? It's hard to be precise about this. The data is spotty and a lot of it is outdated. Much of the evidence is anecdotal. But one thing's for sure: It's a big ethical problem if women are disadvantaged simply because they are women. When I was a kid in the 1950s, growing up in a middle-class area of Winnipeg, most of my friends' mothers stayed home and tended house. If a woman went out to work, it was generally because her husband had trouble making a living (or at least, that's what the local gossips said over the garden fence). There were notable exceptions, of course. People remarked on these exceptions, not always with approval. O P I N I O N @philipslayton SCOTT PAGE Women lawyers The number of women in the legal profession has grown significantly, but a major imbalance still exists By Philip Slayton H THERE'S THAT DAMN GLASS CEILING, ALTHOUGH PERIODICALLY A WOMAN MANAGING PARTNER HERE OR CHIEF OF RESEARCH THERE IS CYNICALLY TROTTED OUT AND DUSTED OFF TO TRY AND DEMONSTRATE THAT THE GLASS CEILING DOESN'T EXIST. L E G A L E T H I C S

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