The Effect on Lawyers Income of Gender Information Contained in First Names
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Bentley Coffey
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Patrick A. McLaughlin
Abstract
We test the Portia Hypothesis – that a more masculine name improves a woman’s legal career – using primary data that we collected so that we can control for an arguably important, but previously omitted, confounding factor: the woman’s parents. In theory, a correlation between nominal masculinity and success may be due to a common cause: parents’ ability to advance their children’s career prospects and the more able parents having an irrelevant preference for masculine names. We control for the family’s wealth by using their child’s educational debt at the time of graduating from law school and for the family’s reputation, within the legal profession, by using the probability of being a lawyer conditional upon their last name. We find robust evidence that a more masculine name improves a woman’s earnings as a lawyer, even when we control for her parents’ wealth and reputation.
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©2016 by De Gruyter
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Becker, Coase, Tullock and Manne: A Personal Tribute
- Convergence of Legal Rules: Comparing Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Processes
- Causal Apportionment of Tort Liability: An Efficient Approach
- The Effect on Lawyers Income of Gender Information Contained in First Names
- An Economic Assessment of Criminal Behaviour
- The 2007 Judicial Reform and Court Performance in Egypt
- Entrepreneurship and the Legal Form of Businesses: The Role of Differences in Beliefs
- How Accurately Can Convertibles be Classified as Debt or Equity for Tax Purposes? Evidence from Australia
- Constitutional Commitment to Social Security and Welfare Policy
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Becker, Coase, Tullock and Manne: A Personal Tribute
- Convergence of Legal Rules: Comparing Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Processes
- Causal Apportionment of Tort Liability: An Efficient Approach
- The Effect on Lawyers Income of Gender Information Contained in First Names
- An Economic Assessment of Criminal Behaviour
- The 2007 Judicial Reform and Court Performance in Egypt
- Entrepreneurship and the Legal Form of Businesses: The Role of Differences in Beliefs
- How Accurately Can Convertibles be Classified as Debt or Equity for Tax Purposes? Evidence from Australia
- Constitutional Commitment to Social Security and Welfare Policy
