Models of professionalism and perceptions of gender discrimination in the legal profession

This chapter explores to what extent the early stages of a legal career are characterised by alternative models of professionalism, and how these models relate to perceptions of gender discrimination. Drawing on quantitative data collected in the context of a comparative study on lawyers in France and in Switzerland, our study reveals four models of professionalism: alongside archetypical ‘male-centred organisational’ professionalism, which assumes the paradigmatic professional to be male, there are alternative models that are differently characterised and distributed among men and women in the two countries. In the case of women, all these models are related to perceptions of gender discrimination. These results suggest that, for female lawyers, a shift away from the male professional norm is only marginally related to new forms of power and sources of legitimacy within the legal profession. However, they also reveal that, in the long term, women may play a significant part in contesting and challenging this norm. The chapter contributes to the ‘within’ dimension of professionalism in that it exposes how, against a background of the occupation becoming extensively feminised, masculine standards of professionalism continue to function as an internal form of social closure that perpetuates gender inequalities within this profession.