Steve Zumbach, a senior partner at the Belin law practice, says his firm’s low rating in a gender equality study released this week by the Nexus Executive Women’s Alliance demonstrates the need for patience rather than a failure by the firm to reach its affirmative hiring goals.

The study, the 2004 Nexus Index, showed 19 percent of the shareholders and partners at the eight largest Greater Des Moines law firms are women, even though women make up nearly half of law school students – 47 percent at the University of Iowa and 49 percent nationally, according to the American Bar Association.

Zumbach’s firm, formally known as Belin Lamson McCormick Zumbach Flynn and the smallest of the firms studied by Nexus, received the lowest ranking with women making up only 7 percent of its shareholders. Other firms ranked, and their percentages of women shareholders or partners, were Hopkins & Huebner, 25 percent; Davis, Brown, Koehn, Shors & Roberts, 24 percent; Brown, Winick, Graves, Gross, Bakersville and Schoenebaum, 17 percent; Whitfield & Eddy, 16 percent; Ahlers & Cooney, 13 percent; Nyemaster, Goode, West, Hansell & O’Brien, 11 percent; Bradshaw, Fowler, Proctor & Fairgrave, 10 percent.

Zumbach said that 25 years after his firm put an affirmative strategy to hire more women in place, “we are not exactly where we want to be.” He said women lawyers are “harder to recruit; not because they’re not talented,” but because Belin’s strategy to hire only top law school graduates puts it in fierce competition with large top-drawer law firms nationwide that share the goal of adding more women to their ranks. “A woman at the very top of her law school class already had choices,” he said. “If a man and woman had identical resumes, it would be harder to recruit the woman because she would have more opportunities.”

Increasing the number of women with ownership stakes at Belin has been an arduous process, plagued by retention issues the profession is struggling with as a whole, Zumbach said. Competing interests, whether family, community involvement or political issues, often derail the partnership track. A study by the National Association for Law Placement found that half of attorneys leave large law firms within three years of placement, most of them making the decision after the first year.

Bigger firms have the luxury of recruiting 20 women attorneys with the hopes one will stay long enough to make partner, but at Belin, “we’re hiring one hoping to get one,” Zumbach said.

As recruitment incentives, his firm increased its starting annual salary to $90,000 to compete with firms in major-market cities, will raise it to $110,000 for the next recruiting class, and has lowered expectations for billable hours to 1,850 from the industry standard of 2,400 hours. Zumbach said he and his partners are reluctant to lower standards for the caliber of lawyer recruited as a means of achieving the firm’s goal for gender equality.

The Nexus Index put the Belin firm’s ratio of men to women in shareholder positions at 25 to 1 in 2004, but Zumbach said three women lawyers have ownership stakes in the practice. Two of them were recruited out of law school, and the third was hired from another law firm to bolster the firm’s areas of practice. Other women have been recruited to the firm, but have left before becoming a shareholder, for a variety of reasons ranging from family demands to political aspiration. In the past decade, half of the eight law school graduates recruited to the firm have been women, and are in line to become shareholders after about five years.

“We are not going to get there quickly,” Zumbach said. “In 10 years, we hope to have women practicing at the highest level of their specialties. … If we can’t get there in 20 years, we’ve failed.”

Other Greater Des Moines attorneys, however, say it’s a matter of law firms creating a culture where women feel secure in pursuing other interests. Lorraine May, a shareholder at Hopkins & Huebner, was conducting business by cell phone one day last week as she hauled her daughter’s jumper horses to St. Louis for a competition, something she felt secure doing in the egalitarian culture that the firm’s senior members embedded some 15 years ago.

With new recruits, the percent of women shareholders at Hopkins & Huebner should increase to 30 from the current 27 percent within three years, May said.

Other law firms have not fared as well in recruitment of women attorneys, and the difference at Hopkins & Huebner, she said, is in the intangibles, “all the things you can’t find written down.” Though equal opportunity employment laws “took away some of the more obvious signs of discrimination and simply required subterfuge,” gender bias hasn’t been eliminated entirely.

“It’s less obvious because the consequences of it being there were so much bigger, but it didn’t eliminate it,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more difficult to see, but you know it’s there. You can feel it, but it’s difficult to define the objective evidence of it.”

Deb Tharnish found a culture friendly to women attorneys at the Davis law firm, which hired its first female lawyer, Lucille Schwilck, during World War II. Now one of 10 female shareholders at the firm, Tharnish joined it as an associate immediately after graduation from the University of Iowa Law School. She had clerked there, and knew it was a place where she could juggle professional and family responsibilities. She served as the firm’s president for two years and said women are included in management decisions at every level.

“It’s a comfortable culture for women,” she said. “We don’t have a glass ceiling.”

Together, Tharnish and her husband, Nick Roby, also a shareholder at the firm, have a blended family of seven children. “No one has to worry they’ll be the first woman to take maternity leave,” said Tharnish, a member of the committee that helped draft the firm’s first maternity leave policy. At the time, none of the big law firms in Des Moines had similar policies, she said.

With five of the children still at home and two in college, Tharnish still bills about 1,700 hours annually and manages to volunteer at her children’s schools and in community organizations. “I maybe bill fewer hours, but [the other shareholders] know I am here for the long run,” she said. “If you want to make it work, you can, but you’ve got to decide what’s going to be important to you, and you have to have the right personality. I am not a perfectionist, and do not have to have every piece of paper in place and my house doesn’t have to be totally clean at all times.”