Are you quite a junior lawyer? Because as the years go by you will find some excellent high achieving colleagues choosing (ie making informed choices to do with what they think is best for dc and knowing they will be able to return) to leave to be sahms for a few years, returning part time as a choice. Not because they are oppressed or because of male privilege or because the men in their life won't step up. By choice and as the preferred option.
Am I quite junior? I qualified 8 years ago if that answers your question. Does that impact on my ability to debate feminism and understand the forces at work that oppress women? I also no longer practise, so my qualification date isn't very important.
What I am more interested in is the way that social structures shape what we think of as 'free choice'. It is indeed a choice (someone making me do something while holding a gun to my head is also still me making a choice), but it's made in the context of significant constraint. Women are told that we cannot have it all- we have to 'choose'. When we choose, we are told that we made the choice, we cannot complain. Men don't have to make the same choices. They can have it all.
Think about it. Child care is expensive, often sub-par, out of sync with working hours. Employers and employment generally is geared towards a hypothetical person with no dependents. In law especially, the expectation is long hours, short notice and an expectation to drop everything and be flexible. The even wider context to that is that we live in a competitive 'have it now' society. Law is incompatible with family life. It requires presenteeism, working until you make yourself ill and and often causes stress and depression in employees.
The division of work is often presented as a choice too. Is it really though? There is a huge expectation that caregivers are female. We have not moved on to the extent that we believe men can be good carers. Women who go back to work are 'putting their career first', often having to justify it with 'I would love to stay home, but I can't afford it'. Women do not get promoted at the same rate as men, regardless of whether they have children. The very thought that they COULD have children makes many employers wary in a way that they never even think about with men. Women are also taught constantly to be subservient, they are likely to have the lower-earning career in the first place because so many men cannot handle a woman who out-earns them. So of course it makes sense for the woman to give up her job.
As for people choosing to leave law, I know so so many women who have left law altogether, abandoned any hopes of rising to the top. You might say choice, but I (and most of them) say constrained choice. It's odd isn't it how men can have aspirations at the beginning of their careers and go on to fulfil them, yet women so often seem to magically change their minds and decide that they didn't actually want to be a QC or a partner or a professor? Must be our inherent flakiness... Or could it be that for a woman, being a QC comes at a cost that isn't there for a man on anywhere near the same level?
If you do want to debate it, I am happy to do so. However, my baseline is that nobody makes totally unconstrained choices and that every time someone talks about women's reduced economic position being a choice, it's ignoring the various oppressive structures that exist in our society and which need to be broken down.
Oh and as for being a SAHM for a few years and easily coming back to law on a part-time basis- HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Seriously.