By KELSEY SWANEKAMP
Buffalo Law Journal

The Women's Bar Association of the State of New York announced Monday that it supports a statement calling for increased advancement of women in the legal profession.

The statement - the Austin Manifesto on Women in Law - calls for equality in the advancement and compensation of women lawyers. The manifesto sets a goal of having 30 percent of top legal positions, such as equity partners and tenured law professors, filled by women by 2015.

In a press release, Cynthia Schrock Seeley, WBASNY president, said the organization wanted to publicize inequality within the legal profession.

"There are a great number of truly qualified women attorneys - those who are as or more qualified than their male counterparts, who experience advancement in far greater numbers," the Glens Falls lawyer said in the release.

The press release also stated that the struggling economy offered an excellent opportunity to "re-examine compensation systems, corporate structures, and client representation paradigms."

The Austin Manifesto on Women in Law is a statement created out of the Women's Power Summit on Law and Leadership, an event hosted by the University of Texas School of Law this spring.

Endorsed by approximately 100 individuals and the National Association of Women Lawyers, the document reads, in part: "We pledge to achieve parity for the generations of women lawyers who follow us by advancing these principles and by working actively to eliminate gender bias and other barriers that impede the advancement of women in the legal profession.... We pledge to be a public voice for change in the legal profession by speaking and writing about these issues; by supporting, conducting and publicizing research that demonstrates the myriad harms to both women and the workplace resulting from barriers confronting women lawyers; by insisting that the institutions of which we are a part support the principles in this Manifesto; and by advocating creative approaches to organizational change that will accomplish these goals."

Natalie Grigg, president of the Western New York chapter of WBASNY, said that the organization's support for the Austin Manifesto was an important move.

"(The manifesto) works well with our mission statement to help women and to promote women in their careers," she said.

"There's nothing a woman can't do that a man can do," said Grigg, a lawyer who works in the bankruptcy department at Steven J. Baum PC. In spite of that, she said, "there have been these inequalities for years."

Grigg added that public attention is essential to ending disparities in pay and leadership roles.

"The more we bring it to public attention, the more people begin to take it seriously and work towards creating equality," she said.