Law Commons^™

Difference Blindness Vs. Bias Awareness: Why Law Firms With The Best Of Intentions Have Failed To Create Diverse Partnerships, Russell G. Pearce, Eli Wald

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses the example of BigLaw firms to explore the challenges that many elite organizations face in providing equal opportunity to their workers. Despite good intentions and the investment of significant resources, large law firms have been consistently unable to deliver diverse partnership structures - especially in more senior positions of power. Building on implicit and institutional bias scholarship and on successful approaches described in the organizational behavior literature, we argue that a significant barrier to systemic diversity at the law firm partnership level has been, paradoxically, the insistence on difference blindness standards that seek to evaluate each person …