Gender at Work: A Mixed Methods Study of Workplace Inequalities in the Quebec Legal Profession
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The legal profession in Canada was traditionally occupied by men. A sweeping feminization of the legal profession occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing more women to the practice of law. Quebec was the last province to admit women to law. Today, Quebec—with its bi-juridical system of avocat.e.s and notaires—has the most feminized legal profession in North America. Regardless of significant changes to the legal profession, gender inequalities persist. The wage gap remains, where women continue to be paid less than men. Women continue to face challenges with career mobility. Experiences of a chilly climate are an additional barrier faced by women. These inequalities in the context of the legal profession in Quebec have received very limited attention in the sociological literature. This dissertation aims to understand gender inequalities amongst avocat.e.s and notaires in Quebec. I focus on three different dynamics of inequality: (1) differential earnings; (2) career mobility (career progress, job satisfaction, departures from law, and departures from private practice); and (3) chilly workplace climate. To explore these dynamics, I use a mixed methods approach. For the quantitative analyses, I rely on a total of 361 longitudinal surveys. For the qualitative analyses, I draw on 50 interviews with avocat.e.s and notaires who have over 20 years of experience in the Quebec legal profession. My study reveals that although a gender gap exists in earnings, the gap is best explained by professional group differences. The evidence shows that gender best predicts the career mobility aspect of departures from private practice. My findings also illustrate how the chilly climate faced by women is characterized by exclusion, sexist comments and stereotypes, negative perceptions of working mothers, and sexual harassment. I conclude that the three dynamics of gender inequality for legal professionals in Quebec are best explained with an integration of theoretical approaches and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".