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Law Firms. Professor Pierce’s covert/ethnographic, overt/interview study of two Bay-area law firms shows that law firms are internally stratified. Men are at the top (with a small set of women) and, in 1989, earned an average of one quarter of a million dollars annually (before profit sharing); women are at the low middle (personnel workers, librarians) and bottom (legal secretaries, word processors, receptionists, case clerks, duplicating operators). The average salary for secretaries that year was $29,000, while paralegals earned an average of $30,000. In the large private firm Pierce studied, the attorney stratum (48 partners, 102 associates) was 99 percent white and 88 percent male; in the second site, the legal department of a large corporation (36 senior counsel, 114 associates), the attorney stratum was 95 percent white and 80 percent male. Focusing on both firms’ litigation units (as opposed to other types of law), Pierce shows that law firms are gendered hierarchies because the work performed in them is gendered, particularly with regard to emotion work. That is, men at the top perform the male-stereotyped emotional work of aggression, winning at all costs, humiliating the other, intimidating, wooing, strategic flattering, and marshaling all conceivable emotional resources in the name of being a successful adversary. The emotional work demanded of the overwhelming majority of female employees complements that of the men. The women use intuition to anticipate people’s needs. They reassure everyone (particularly the lawyers); they support and maintain the emotional stability of the lawyers through deferential treatment and caretaking; they affirm the status of everyone “above” them. Their job is to be pleasant and to work effectively with difficult people. Thus, instead of liberating men and women from sex-role stereotypes, high-powered law firms have had the opposite effect. While men in these law firms have sustained or even revived the atavistic “Rambo model” of masculinity, the women have sustained the model