As we’ve discussed before, there aren’t nearly as many women at the top of the legal profession as there should be. In addition, the achievements of women lawyers aren’t promoted as much as those of their male counterparts. So it’s understandable that women would want to be eligible for—and have the chance to win—awards for the “best woman XYZ lawyer.” If nothing else, giving those awards forces those organizations who give them to identify talented women.

It’s also nice to have these awards because it allows younger women to see that there are, in fact, women above them doing great things. Those awards may help younger women to identify older women with whom they can network to further their careers. And they can assist women in identifying law firms and other employers who promote women’s achievements—since presumably if a workplace has a “Top X Women Lawyer,” the workplace does something to support that woman’s efforts. At a bare minimum, when a woman lawyer receives such an award it means that woman’s workplace has a PR department that wants to look like it supports women lawyers.

It’s not just young women lawyers who may use these lists to identify women at the top of their game. Potential clients, judges, bar associations, and other organizations looking for diversity may want to utilize them. (That being said, if our aim is to promote diversity, we should have awards for more categories of lawyers than just women, but that’s another issue entirely.)

For all of these reasons, giving these types of awards to women lawyers certainly benefits the legal profession as a whole.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Having Categories of Awards for Women Lawyers

On the other hand, do awards for women lawyers actually hurt women? Shouldn’t we just be included in the top securities lawyers, or top prosecutors, or other similar gender-neutral categories? Do we really need separate women-only recognitions in order to promote successful women in law? Aren’t women hurt by the perception, however unmerited, that they do not or cannot compete with men in the same award categories?

Ultimately, including women lawyers in the same categories as men shows that women do and can compete on the same playing fields. In many sports, there are separate leagues for women because there is at least a perception that women have an inherent physical disadvantage. Getting rid of gender-based distinctions presumes that there are no such disadvantages.

And, of course, getting rid of gender-based awards is more inclusive for non-binary lawyers. When we talk about legal excellence, we really shouldn’t be concerned about the gender attached to that excellence. It doesn’t matter.

But if we eliminated gender-based awards, what would we lose?

Particularly because there are so few women at the top, there is a danger that, if we stopped giving awards to categories of women lawyers, women would not get recognized as much as they should. Although there isn’t data about this in law, the RAISE project tracked more than 2,750 awards in the male-dominated fields of science, engineering, technology, arts, mathematics, and medicine, and determined the proportion of men and women who won those awards. The Project found that only 13% of the winners of the National Medal of Science were women; 10% of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine were women, and 5% of the Fields Medal winners were women. Overall, as shown below, women won very few gender-neutral awards in STEM fields:

Julie Silver, an Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School who has studied awards made in medicine, found that: “[w]hen women physicians are award recipients, they tend to receive the less prestigious awards and are often noticeably absent for the top awards that confer the greatest honor and sometimes are associated with financial prizes.” We have to ask whether the same thing would occur in the legal profession.

Moreover, in the section above, I noted that “[g]etting rid of gender-based distinctions presumes that there are no such [inherent] disadvantages.” And while of course women lawyers don’t have inherently physical, mental, or emotional disadvantages, they do have substantial institutional ones. Women don’t get promoted to senior positions in law firms; they aren’t typically lead trial counsel; they aren’t lead counsel in Multidistrict Litigation; and they aren’t the ones arguing appellate issues at the U.S. Supreme Court or lower appellate courts; and, although this is getting better, they aren’t the ones wearing robes either. Within their workplaces, senior women don’t have female colleagues to support and promote them. If there are informal groups of ambitious or high-achieving lawyers in a workplace or co-counsel groups, women are more often not invited to—or outright excluded from—those groups.

These statistics have consequences for who would win gender-neutral awards. For example, if we were to eliminate gendered awards, women would have to depend on other women or men to nominate them for those awards. Both of these are problematic. If, as I discussed above, women have less visibility in virtually every aspect of our profession, how will they be well-known enough to be nominated? In addition, misogyny or just the plain good ‘ole boys network keeps women from having their names put forward.

Finally, if we were to eliminate gender-specific awards, fewer people overall would receive awards. There’s unquestionable value to broadening the number and types people we recognize.

I started this issue as an opinion piece but found the questions far more complex than I initially thought. That’s because gender-neutral awards are great when there’s a level playing field, but we aren’t even close to having one in the law yet. We think we want to eliminate women-only awards to increase the perception that we can compete in the same arenas, but if we eliminate the awards the institutional prejudices against us will just reinforce the perceptions that we can’t. Both options seem like no-win situations.

So, what do you think? Is it time for the profession get rid of gender-based awards?

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