When describing the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Martin Luther King once quoted a Southern minister's assessment: "We aren't where we need to be, we aren't where we should be, we aren't where we hope to be, but thank God, we're not where we were." The same is true of women and the legal profession.

When the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession was formed two decades ago, women accounted for just over a tenth of American lawyers, and women of color were noticeable for their absence. During the last two decades, women have made enormous progress in identifying the barriers to equality and creating a cottage industry to address them. Gender equity and the lack thereof are the subjects of an increasing array of committees, consultants, centers, conferences, and commissions.

Yet despite our increased understanding of the problem, women remain a dispiriting distance from solving it. Women are still significantly overrepresented at the bottom and underrepresented at the top. The statistics are all too familiar. Women are half of the new entrants to the profession but less than a fifth of law firm partners, general counsels, federal judges, law school deans, state attorney generals, and so forth. For women of color, the situation is still worse; they constitute only 2 percent of law firm partners and general counsel.

Women are also, to some extent, the victims of earlier successes. The presence of so many women in highvisibility positions masks the contexts in which they are still missing in action and the structural constraints that get in their way. A common assumption is that women's current underrepresentation reflects women's choices - their decision to leave the paid labor force at higher rates than for men and for longer periods. Yet what drops out of this "opt-out" narrative are the largely unintended gender biases and inflexible workplace structures that influence women's decisions to step off the track for advancement and that limit opportunities for those who stay or try to return.

Those barriers have been chronicled extensively, including in the recent coedited collection, Women & Leadership: The State of Play and Strategies for Change (Kellerman and Rhode, eds. 2007). The problems cluster on three levels. The first involves unconscious gender stereotypes. Women still confront a double standard and a double bind. What is assertive in a man seems abrasive in a woman, and female professionals risk seeming too feminine or not feminine enough. An overview of more than 100 studies confirms that women are rated lower when they adopt "masculine" authoritative styles that are still thought necessary for leadership positions. So too, having children makes women, but not men, appear less competent and less available to meet workplace responsibilities.

A second cluster of problems involves gender bias in the informal networks of mentoring, contacts, and support that are critical for advancement. In the Commission's most recent study, Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms (2006), some 60 percent of women, but only 4 percent of white men, felt excluded from networking opportunities. A final problem involves unequal burdens in family responsibilities and inadequate workplace accommodations.

Women continue to have vastly disproportionate burdens in the home, which limit opportunities in the world outside it. Many lack time for mentoring and career development opportunities. Others find it impossible to juggle family demands while remaining tethered to their office through e-mails, faxes, beepers, and BlackBerrys.

In short, women's aspirations to equality have far outpaced their achievements. We remain a considerable distance from a world in which commissions on women in the profession will no longer be needed.

So this anniversary is less a conclusion than a commencement. It is also an occasion to thank Commission members and supporters, who have made an enormous difference for many who will never know the costs. And thanks to Perspectives for this chance to express appreciation for my opportunity to serve with so many wonderful women. Let us hope for a new generation that will be equally inspired to secure the progress that remains to be made.