OUT OF THE CLOSET AND UP THE LADDER? DIVERSITY IN ONTARIO’S BIG LAW FIRMS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While Canadian law generally provides protection against sexual orientation discrimination, and social acceptance is growing, there are some indications that LGBTQ lawyers face barriers relating to their sexual identity. Although more LGBTQ lawyers are now ‘out at work’, quantitative data is incomplete, and little is known about the actual experience of LGBTQ lawyers, who enter big firms in Ontario with the hope to advance through the ranks. This article begins to address this gap by providing qualitative analysis of the personal experience of LGBTQ lawyers entering the profession and the extent to which in-firm diversity initiatives shape their experience. Three main themes emerged from the interviews. First, racialized gay lawyers more consciously described their experiences at big law firms as negative and related it to their minority status. Second, the interviews offer insight into the ways in which gays and lesbians are forced to negotiate and perform their identity in a heteronormative workplace. Finally, the insights gleaned from the interviews suggest that the diversity programs devised by law firms may have helped diversify the lower ranks of law firms, but they seem to have failed to address the barriers that equity-seeking groups continue to face in retention and advancement through the ranks. The heteronormative organizational culture, as well as the promotion and compensation structures in firms continue to drive the composition of the leadership ranks and it arguably perpetuates homogeneity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".