James Brown famously said it’s a man’s world in 1966, and he wasn’t far from wrong. That year, there were 533 federal judges but only five were women. There were 300,000 lawyers but only about 9,000 were women.
Times change. Today, most law school students are women and most federal government lawyers are women. There are 484 female federal judges and more than 500,000 female lawyers.
This 2024 Profile of the Legal Profession takes a deeper statistical look at women in the law. Chapter 1 examines the trends in the workplace and in law schools. It shows how women have become a majority in some parts of the profession — and also how women are still a minority in the higher echelons.
This sixth annual Profile report was produced by ABA Communications. Our goal is to provide authoritative data for lawyers, academics and journalists. Statistics are from sources within the ABA, the federal government and legal nonprofit groups.