This is an interesting article but not necessarily for the intended reasons:
Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin joined Ms. Robertson in her siege against a “business model” of operating law firms that is soul-destroying, outmoded and steadily driving women away from a private law practice. The business model typically involves an expectation that lawyers will put in 70 or 80-hour weeks and forgo their family lives in return for wealth and partnership status. Putting aside her prepared text in favour of an off-the-cuff analysis of the evolution of women’s battle to gain an equal place in the law, Chief Justice McLachlin said that for women, winning that legal right to become lawyers was only half the battle. More than half of law school graduates are now women, she said, yet they are grossly underrepresented in private law firms.
The funny thing is, of course, men are equally affected but sometimes it happens in ways we call success. Male or female, the pressured private lawyer can find themselves with no home life, drinking or simply losing it at work – and like any lawyer I have been witness to these breakdowns – but carries themselves as a business leader to the greater community and sometimes even at home. Massive accommodations at work are made all around the person but often the root cause is not to be addressed. What is the root cause? Often the burden of carrying the responsibility for solving horrible crises of other is just too much, often the expectation of a millionaire’s life-style is the cause of over-whelming debt. Often it is just too much for any reasonably balanced person.
The legal profession at least in Canada has followed down a path that allows it to characterize all this as unfair to women. I have no idea why it is not blindingly obvious as being unfair to men, too.