Just Like Global Firms: Unintended Gender Parity and Speculative Isomorphism in India's Elite Professions, Swethaa Ballakrishnen

As discussed earlier, the state and globalization are two major social forces that shape the development of Asian legal professions. While the state intervenes in the legal services market by setting up professional groups and mediate their competition, globalization penetrates the legal profession by influencing its most prestigious and profitable sector - namely, corporate law firms that serve large, multinational corporations.

Recent comparative demographic research on the legal profession reveals that while most countries have followed a trend of positive feminization over the last half a century, two countries - India and China - still offer strong resist­ance to this norm. Of these, India, despite having one of the world's largest legal professions with over a million lawyers, still remains the least feminized with women comprising less than 10% of the profession overall. This unequal representation becomes even starker at senior levels. And the patterns described in historical accounts continue today, with many successful profes­sional women still facing inhospitable work environments. India's new cor­porate law firms, however, offer a sharp contrast to this pattern, with women attorneys in these firms experiencing a vastly more encouraging professional environment. Among these new and prestigious firms, women constitute slightly more than half of the entering cohort and a similarly significant representation at partnership. This kind of gender parity is unusual for presti­gious workplaces in general but especially stark given the broader evidence about gender and professional work in India.

While lawyers with successful pre-liberalization practices started many of these firms, it was only post-1991 that the organization of elite law firm practice began to mimic the institutional prototype of the Anglo-American corporate mega-law firm. The context of these firms' emergence were essential because it set up why these firms were in a uniquely vulnerable position, both vis-a-vis their peers within the profession as well as their global audiences.

As I describe above, before 1991, private investment in domestic industries was not allowed and trade was heavily regulated. This meant that domestic lawyers were involved in mainly domestic transactions. However, with liberal­ization, domestic law firms had to reinvent themselves to deal with a range of international cross-border transactional work (e.g., mergers and acquisition, private equity, and international finance transactions). [...]

Together, these emergence conditions created a fragile position for elite Indian law firms. These firms were organizing themselves in new ways, doing new work, facing sophisticated international clients, and they were doing all of this without the direct structural intervention of foreign firms. And as firms that were boisterously opposing the entry of foreign law firms, Indian law firms seemed to be in a particularly vulnerable position for maintaining and signal­ing a competitive global image to their competitors and clients alike. To strategically position themselves, firms adopted two dominant mechanisms, each of which was meant to signal a certain identity of modernity and meritocracy both to external audiences (i.e., clients, international peers) and to their own associates. First, they differentiated themselves from the rest of their peers and made clear that they were unique professional spaces not tainted by the old-school logic of their predecessors.

But it was not just that these associates and partners felt like their firm was different from traditional litigation practice. Top law firms in the country recruited in local law schools almost exclusively on the basis of merit and invited their new associates to an environment that was both visibly and organizationally different from traditional legal practice. While litigation practices and smaller firms operated in decrepit old buildings, offices of large elite law firms in Mumbai looked and felt like any international law firm. Located in prime real estate, and designed to impress, these air-conditioned, fine-art-studded offices felt distinctly different from the pigeon-nest lined buildings, with their old elevators, that housed older litigation offices. But it was not just how these spaces were experienced by associates that was telling of how deeply ingrained this logic of differentiation was. Partners, many of whom had been central to the creation of these firms, were keen to highlight the ways in which their firms were unlike traditional legal practice in the country, especially when it came to how the firm treated its associates. Kamal, a senior partner who had seen the firm grow over the last two decades, made the comparison this way:

In the courts, in litigation practice, nobody is treated equally - the judiciary still hasn't reached that level of maturity. The thinking used to be “Ah, the women will come, get married” or, even, “If they make a point (during court arguments) then it will be more emotional than substance.” But all other things being equal, in a place like this [an elite law firm] women score over men...

The “culture” Kamal mentioned is important because it set the tone for the kind of merit-based workspace that Niyant and Nina spoke about. This projection of being more gender sensitive than litigation practice was central to the identity of these firms - as was the ideology that gender would not be the yardstick used to discriminate. Instead, by maintaining high standards of merit-based entry, they saw themselves as being above the clutches of discrim­ination that plagued their more traditional peers. And this commitment was well received. Like many of her peers, Lata, a senior associate in one of these firms who saw her path to partnership clearly before her, told me “if I had been in litigation, it would have been different... But not here [in an elite law firm].” [...]

I use the phrase “assumed similarity” here because this perception of international firms as capstones of meritocracy and gender parity was closer to an ideal-type assumption than it was to reality. And this senior partner's statement was not an isolated reference - some version of the phrase “merit is everything” came up in other conversations about gender in these firms, confirming that even if they did not have structural access to global firms, there was a central assumption that the ideology of merit and equal opportun­ity was important to those global firms. The pressure to “keep up with the times” demanded an aggressive reorientation that brought these Indian firms' own image in line with this prominent ideology, to show that they were serious global players. At the same time, as local firms without strong connec­tions to the global firms they were trying to mimic, their knowledge and response to these macrocultural scripts was both speculative and, incidentally, more adherent.

In other words, lawyers did not necessarily think that Western firms had equal number of women; instead they saw meritocracy and equal opportunity as core ideals on which these firms were built - or at least saw meritocracy, independent of outcome, as an important ideology that these firms subscribed to. And in their need to aggressively signal both competence and competitive advantage in a global environment, meritocracy became a predominant ideal norm that Indian firms paid ceremonial deference to. In turn, their offices looked like the firms in whose image they emerged: they structured their partnerships with lockstep compensation, they hired from prestigious law schools in the country with recruitment and internship cycles that resembled those of their foreign peers, and they promoted their women partners without attention to gender. This lack of attention to gender did not mean these firms were being gender friendly, and this nondiscrimination on the basis of gender did not mean that firms were substantively egalitarian. As I show in other work, these conditions privileged different kinds of inequalities and reproduced a range of other hierarchies. But in being nondiscriminatory on the axis of gender within a professional sector where this was highly unusual, these firms, almost inadvertently, superseded the gendered outcomes of the Western firms they were attempting to ideologically mimic. As the senior partner above put it, these development occurred “sometimes not consciously...it’s just happened that way.”

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