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Explanations of gender inequality typically emphasize individual characteristics, the structure of internal labor markets, or pressures from the institutional environment. Extending the structuralist and institutional perspectives, this article argues that the demographic composition of an organization's exchange partners can influence the demographic composition of the focal organization when the focal organization is dependent upon its partners. Specifically, law firms with women-led corporate clients increase the number of partners who are women attorneys. Data on elite law firms and their publicly traded clients support a bargaining power hypothesis whereby law firms promote women attorneys when their corporate clients have women in three key leadership positions: general (legal) counsel, chief executive officer, and board director. These effects are stronger when the law firm has few clients, reinforcing the hypothesis that interorganizational influence is more vital when a focal organization is dependent on its exchange partner. The results also support a related explanation based on homophily theory. The analysis rules out several alternative explanations and establishes a relationship between the presence of women-led clients and the promotion of women attorneys in law firms.
Since Baron and Bielby's (1980) call to engage more directly the role of organizations in stratification processes, an informative and compelling set of research has improved our understanding of how organizations affect individual attainment (see Kerckhoff 1995 for a review). One of the principal areas of research within this vein has been the mobility of women within organizations (e.g., Baron, Mittman, and Newman 1991; Cohen, Broschak, and Haveman 1998). Through work that has emphasized both individual ascriptive differences and structural bases of mobility and inequality (Rosenbaum 1984; Chase 1991; Blair-Loy 1999), a wealth of insight has been produced on the relationship between organizations and the attainment of women.
The attainment of women is linked to a number of organizational and institutional factors. Many past studies examine factors internal to the employer (e.g., size, hierarchical structure, the use of job titles, demographic composition). Other research incorporates the environment of employers and often conceptualizes the environment abstractly in terms of market or institutional pressures (Edelman 1992; DiPrete and Nonnemaker 1997). Less emphasis is placed on the exchange relations that constitute the social structure of the environment. We contend that greater attention to exchange relations can broaden...