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&lt;p&gt;Last week, the Project for Attorney Retention (PAR) and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA) released a report regarding the gender gap in compensation among law firm partners, &quot;New Millennium, Same Glass Ceiling?&quot;. The study has generated some buzz, both within and beyond  the legal community (e.g., &lt;i&gt;The Careerist&lt;/i&gt;: &quot;Show Me the Money&amp;mdash;Not Work/Life Balance,&quot; and &lt;i&gt;Newsweek&lt;/i&gt;: &quot;Even Female Law Partners Suffer Wage Disparities&quot;), though it seems that at least some of the surprised reactions are triggered less by findings that systemic problems in law firm compensation practices &quot;open the door to gender bias&quot; than by the discovery that women are really angry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;PAR and MCCA surveyed nearly 700 women partners who voiced &quot;intense dissatisfaction&quot; with disparities in pay and power. Because women, and especially minority women, are underrepresented at the upper levels of the law firm hierarchy,* they have limited means to address these issues. As noted by Veta Richardson, MCCA&#39;s executive director and co-author of the report: &quot;With few women on compensation committees and in top management positions, women law firm partners&#39; ability to influence compensation decisions and address salary differentials is limited.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;While some of the problems discussed are structural (e.g., questions as to whether the right factors are used to determine compensation), others are behavioral. According to the report, &quot;Roughly one-third of the women surveyed reported having been bullied, threatened or intimidated out of origination credit, a key factor in setting compensation.&quot; Moreover, a majority of the minority partners surveyed said &quot;that they had participated in client pitches that yielded work for their firms&amp;mdash;but that they were excluded when the time came to do the work.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The study&#39;s findings undercut the common arguments that women are paid less because they work less, generate less business or focus more on family. Fortunately, the report also outlines a series of best practices to help firms establish fairer compensation systems&amp;mdash;systems that, the authors conclude, will better serve the long-term interests of law firms in the 21st century&amp;mdash;including ways to improve transparency, redesign origination credit and introduce &quot;checks on bias and in-group favoritism.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;MCCA, PAR and the ABA Commission on Women are also compiling a companion report titled &quot;Sustaining Pathways to Diversity&amp;mdash;A Survey of Women Partners on Law Firm Compensation and Recommended Approaches for a More Equitable Playing Field,&quot; which is expected to be released later this summer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p align=&quot;right&quot;&gt;- posted by vera&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;_____&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p style=&quot;font-style: italic;&quot;&gt;*According to data collected by Vault and MCCA in our annual Law Firm Diversity Survey, more than three-quarters of law firm equity partners are white men. Women represent less than 16 percent of the attorneys on firms&#39; executive committees; and,  if you count only minority women, that number drops to less than 2 percent. (These numbers are based on last year&amp;rsquo;s diversity survey results; this year&amp;rsquo;s results will be released in a few weeks.)&lt;/p&gt;

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