Equal Pay for Disproportionate Work: Assessing Cultural Taxation in the Legal Profession

This study analyses career trajectories in law firms through the lens of cultural taxation and hypercompetitive meritocracy. The concept of cultural taxation was initially developed to explain ethnic minority university professors’ disproportionately high participation rates in professional organizations and committees to overcome perceived prejudices or to satisfy organizational pressure from universities, which might expect accolades for having racially or ethnically diverse committees and organizations. However, institutions seldom reward this extra labour via promotions or pay raises. The hypercompetitive meritocracy thesis predicts fewer opportunities for upward career mobility for underrepresented minorities as they lack access to quality mentorship and often get assigned to less desirable tasks that offer fewer chances for recognition. Using the American Bar Foundation’s “After the J.D.” dataset, we test cultural taxation in the legal profession using reported measures of professional organization memberships as a proxy for extracurricular labour and the likelihood of promotion over careers for underrepresented minorities. The results provide strong evidence for cultural taxation among Black female attorneys, but not among other minorities. However, our results also reveal slower wage growth for minority lawyers compared to their White counterparts. These disadvantages in wage growth were especially salient among Asian lawyers.