This engaging ethnography examines the gendered nature of today's large corporate law firms. Although increasing numbers of women have become lawyers in the past decade, Jennifer Pierce discovers that the double standards and sexist attitudes of legal bureaucracies are a continuing problem for women lawyers and paralegals.

Working as a paralegal, Pierce did ethnographic research in two law offices, and her depiction of the legal world is quite unlike the glamorized version seen on television. Pierce tellingly portrays the dilemma that female attorneys face: a woman using tough, aggressive tactics—the ideal combative litigator—is often regarded as brash or even obnoxious by her male colleagues. Yet any lack of toughness would mark her as ineffective.

Women paralegals also face a double bind in corporate law firms. While lawyers depend on paralegals for important work, they also expect these women—for most paralegals are women—to nurture them and affirm their superior status in the office hierarchy. Paralegals who mother their bosses experience increasing personal exploitation, while those who do not face criticism and professional sanction. Male paralegals, Pierce finds, do not encounter the same difficulties that female paralegals do.

Pierce argues that this gendered division of labor benefits men politically, economically, and personally. However, she finds that women lawyers and paralegals develop creative strategies for resisting and disrupting the male-dominated status quo. Her lively narrative and well-argued analysis will be welcomed by anyone interested in today's gender politics and business culture.

Jennifer L. Pierce is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.

“By looking at litigators and paralegals in relations to each other, as well as in relations to the others in their own occupation, Pierce does an exceptionally clear job of demonstrating the effects of gender power and class hierarchy as structures, as well as showing the individual actors’ efforts to conform and to resist these demands. The book also provides considerable insight into the emotional dimensions of both jobs, challenging stereotypes that see emotion work only when it is displayed by a gendered female.”—Choice

“Pierce’s very readable account . . . compares the sex-segregated occupations of the attorney and the paralegal, looking both at the manner in which the structure of these jobs and the organizations in which these workers participate presume and reproduce hierarchical relations of gender and at the ways in which male and female workers perpetuate or resist that structure.”—Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

“[Pierce’s] book joins a small, cutting-edge literature that is elucidating the processes that continue to reproduce inequality in the modern, capitalist workplace. For those interested in the sociology of law, this is a compelling and accessible account of the ways in which previously understudied aspects of legal work involving emotion and gender are shaping the legal profession—and, by extension, the way law is practiced.”—Law and Politics Review

“In this well-written book, Jennifer Pierce integrates a macrolevel analysis of law firms as gendered organizations and a microlevel analysis of how legal workers participate in the reproduction of gender relations.”—Social Forces

“Pierce deftly braids together several theoretical strands to show why sex segregation in law firms persists despite modern egalitarian values and increasing numbers of women pursuing careers there. . . . The strength of Gender Trials is its focus not just on men as perpetuators of workplace domination, but on women as active agents in the reproduction of their own subordination.”—Women’s Review of Books

"This is an exciting contribution to our understanding of gender and emotion in workplaces everywhere."—Arlie Hochschild, author of The Second Shift and The Managed Heart

"As a participant observer and insightful critic of lawyers' workplaces, Jennifer Pierce gives us a richly detailed picture of sex-based inequality and the strategies necessary to address it."—Deborah L. Rhode, Director, Keck Center on Legal Ethics and the Legal Profession, Stanford University

"Gender Trials is an important addition to the literature on gender and work. In studying each gender within different jobs (litigator, paralegal) and different jobs within each gender, Pierce uncovers the complexities and contradictions of 'doing gender' in contemporary law firms. The phrases 'Rambo litigator' and 'mothering paralegal' capture the normative and behavioral convergences of job and gender in these firms. In analysing resistance as well as compliance, and the emotional and identity costs associated with both dynamics, Pierce produces an insightful, and disturbing, picture of legal practice in our time."—Patricia Yancey Martin, Florida State University

"Pierce's lively first-hand account of women and men at work in several law firms greatly expands our empirical and theoretical understanding of what it means to say that occupations and work organizations are 'gendered.'"—Miriam Johnson, University of Oregon