Michael Ornstein, Director of the ORU-Institute for Social Research here at York University, has prepared a report for the Law Society of Upper Canada entitled Racialization and Gender of Lawyers in Ontario. This report, tabled at a recent meeting of Convocation, reveals a remarkable shift in the demographic makeup of the legal profession in Ontario.
From the executive summary:
"The number of lawyers who are women, Aboriginal and members of a visible minority continues to grow, transforming the face of a profession that until the early 1970s was primarily White and male. Drawing on Canadian Censuses, this report provides a statistical portrait of a profession in the midst of fundamental transition ... Leading the transformation is an extraordinary increase in the percentage and number of women lawyers."
However, Ornstein also notes that there continues to be significant disparities in salaries when compared with their "White male counterparts":
"Relative to men, the earnings of women lawyers increased substantially between 1970 and 1995, but there has been little improvement since ... There is strong evidence that racialized lawyers have lower earnings than White lawyers the same age and this difference is much larger than the gender difference."
Ornstein has used the data from the 2006 long form Census questionnaire to prepare this report.