Women in the Legal Profession

Law firm associates

In January 2024, the National Association for Law Placement made a big announcement: For the first time ever, women were a majority of all law firm associates.

It wasn’t a surprise to anyone who followed law firm trends. The numbers had been moving in that direction for years. Still, it was an important milestone.

Every year, NALP surveys law firms to count lawyers by gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and physical handicap. Starting in 1991, when 38.4% of all law firm associates were women, the association has tracked the slow, steady rise of female associates — passing 40% in 1997, passing 45% in 2007, finally passing 50% in 2023.

It’s not a blip or an anomaly. It’s the natural result of large numbers of women graduating from law schools, passing the bar exam and entering law firms. Every year for the past 32 years, with only a few exceptions, the percentage of female lawyers in law firms has gone up.

A majority of female law school grads (58%) choose jobs in law firms, according to NALP — as do a majority of male law school grads (60%). And so, with the number of female law students continuing to grow, the number of female law firm associates will also continue to grow in years to come.

Source: National Association for Law Placement

Source: National Association for Law Placement

Federal government lawyers

Now that most newly minted lawyers are women, another former male domain has been toppled: the executive branch of the federal government.

There are more than 2.2 million employees of the executive branch of the federal government, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Among them, nearly 44,000 are categorized as general attorneys.

A majority of those attorneys — 51.5% — were women, as of December 2023. And the percentage is steadily growing.

Almost two decades ago, in 2005, 43% of all general attorneys in the executive branch were women. Since then, the number of female general attorneys has nearly doubled —  from 12,456 in 2005 to 22,105 in 2023. The number of male general attorneys also grew, but at a slower rate.

It’s not that women are more likely to enter government service than men. Actually, the rate is about the same for new male and female law school graduates: 12% for men, 11% for women, according to the National Association for Law Placement. It’s simply that there are so many more women getting JD degrees.

And where do those female general attorneys work in the federal government? Here’s where the numbers get interesting.

Most general attorneys in the executive branch work in cabinet-level agencies, but the differences among agencies is striking. In the Justice Department, where the greatest number of general attorneys work (nearly 13,000), a majority are men (54%). But in the Department of Homeland Security, with more than 3,000 general attorneys, a majority are women (55%).

Other cabinet-level agencies where female general attorneys are a majority include Education (69%), Health and Human Services (66%), Labor (63%), Housing and Urban Development (59%), State (59%), Veterans Affairs (58%), Commerce (58%), Interior (56%), Transportation (54%) and Energy (51%). Women are a minority in the Defense Department, Army, Navy and Air Force.

Among large, independent federal agencies, female lawyers are even more prevalent. That includes the Social Security Administration, with 2,120 female general attorneys, or 61% of the total.

Source: U.S. Office of Personnel Management FedScope

Source: U.S. Office of Personnel Management FedScope

Law school faculty and leadership

The student body at U.S. law schools became majority female in 2016. Now, the full-time faculty at those law schools is also about to become majority female.

For accreditation purposes, the ABA tracks many things at U.S. law schools, including the number of faculty members and their gender. In 2023, there were 10,032 full-time faculty members at 196 ABA-accredited law schools. Slightly less than half of those faculty members — 49.2% — were women.

At the current rate of change, that number will probably cross the 50% threshold in the next year or two. The percentage of full-time faculty members who are women has inched up by one percentage point in each of the last two years.

Where is the faculty most heavily female? Five law schools have full-time faculties where women outnumber men by 2-to-1 or more: Widener (73%), Western New England (70%), Detroit Mercy (68%), North Carolina Central (67%), Roger Williams (67%) and Vermont (67%).

And where is the faculty most heavily male? Five law schools have full-time faculties that are more than 70% male: Puerto Rico (74%), Faulkner (74%), Liberty (73%), George Mason (72%) and Northern Kentucky (71%).

As for law school leadership, 42% of law schools had female deans as of Sept. 1, 2024. That figure has quadrupled since 2000 but hasn’t changed much since 2020. 

Sources: ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Rosenblatt's Deans Database

Source: ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar

The big picture

Overall, men still outnumber women in the legal profession, but that becomes less true with each passing year.

A decade ago, in 2014, roughly one-third of all U.S. lawyers were women — 36%, to be exact, according to the annual ABA National Lawyer Population Survey. Today, 41% of all lawyers are women, the survey says.

In other words, if the current trend persists, it will take about two decades before men and women are represented 50-50 in the legal profession. It is a very slow process. Each year, older, predominantly male lawyers are retiring while younger, predominantly female lawyers are entering the profession.

Where are female lawyers most prevalent? No state has a female majority but Georgia has a 50-50 split, according to the State Bar of Georgia. In addition, the District of Columbia has slightly more female lawyers than men (52%-48%), according to the District of Columbia Bar. Puerto Rico is close to a 50-50 split, with women representing 49% of all lawyers, according to attorney regulators there.

And where is the legal profession most heavily male? That’s Utah, where 74% of all lawyers are men, according to the Utah State Bar, followed by Idaho, where 69% of the lawyers are men.

Source: ABA National Lawyer Population Survey

Source: 2024 ABA National Lawyer Population Survey

Law firm partners

For all the progress women have made in the legal profession recently, there are still places — particularly in the higher echelons — where that progress is so agonizingly slow that it is almost invisible.

The most prominent example is in law firms. Even though women are now a majority of law firm associates, they are still a distinct minority among law firm partners, according to surveys by the National Association for Law Placement.

In 2023, just 28% of all law firm partners were women, according to the latest NALP national survey. The number grows every year, but slowly – less than one percentage point a year. A decade earlier, in 2013, just 20% of law firm partners were female, according to the NALP.

Among equity partners, the number changes even more slowly. For many years, according to the National Association of Women Lawyers, the percentage of equity partners who were female was essentially unchanged. Every year from 2006 to 2012, without exception, 15% or 16% of equity partners were women. Then the number started creeping up by roughly one percentage point a year. In 2012, it was 15%. By 2020, it was 22% — still low, especially considering that a majority of law firm associates are women.

The number of women in law firm leadership roles is similarly low. Just 12% of managing partners are female, 28% of governance committee members are female, 27% of practice group leaders are female, according to the NAWL survey.

Sources: National Association for Law Placement, National Association of Women Lawyers

Source: National Association for Law Placement

Leaving law firms

Why do many women leave law firms mid-career? A 2019 study by the ABA and ALM Intelligence, “Walking Out the Door,” provides some answers.

Male and female lawyers strongly disagreed on how well their law firms foster long-term careers for women, according to the survey of more than 1,200 senior lawyers at the nation’s biggest law firms.

Generally, men thought their law firms treated women fairly, but women disagreed. For example, the vast majority of men (88%) said gender diversity is widely acknowledged as a firm priority. Barely half of women (54%) agreed. Also, nearly 3 out of 4 men (74%) said their law firms successfully retained experienced women. Less than half of women (47%) agreed.

Female lawyers also reported significantly less job satisfaction than men in several important areas. For example, 71% of men said they were satisfied with the recognition they received at work, but only 50% of women said the same. Likewise, 62% of men said they were satisfied with opportunities for advancement at their law firms, but only 45% of women felt the same.

The survey also revealed that half of all female lawyers (50%) said they experienced unwanted sexual conduct at work, and 1 in 4 women said they avoided reporting sexual harassment due to fear of retaliation. One in six female lawyers (16%) said they lost work opportunities as a result of rebuffing sexual advances.

Finally, the women surveyed said caretaking commitments are the No. 1 reason (58%) why experienced female lawyers leave law firms, followed by stress at work (54%) and emphasis on marketing or originating business (51%).

Source: Walking Out the Door, 2019, ABA and ALM Intelligence

Source: Walking Out the Door, 2019, ABA and ALM Intelligence

Source: Walking Out the Door, 2019, ABA and ALM Intelligence

Judges

A chronological chart showing the gender of every federal judge for every year in the nation’s history is pretty boring — until it gets to 1928.

For the first 138 years of the United States, there were 740 federal judges. Every one of them was male.

And then, on May 4, 1928, President Calvin Coolidge nominated Genevieve Rose Cline, a lawyer and an appraiser of merchandise with the U.S. Treasury Department in Cleveland, Ohio, to the U.S. Customs Court. She was confirmed three weeks later.

But even then, there was no mad rush to name more female federal judges. Six years passed before there was a second woman on the federal bench… and then 16 more years for the third woman. And then 12 more years for the fourth.

It wasn’t until 1968 that women were even 1% of the federal judiciary.

Today (as of Aug. 1, 2024), there are 484 Article III federal judges who are women. That includes all active judges and senior judges. That sounds like a lot but combined they are just 33% of all sitting Article III federal judges, according to the Federal Judicial Center. That is far less than the share of women in the nation’s population, 50.5%.

Until recently, the percentage of female federal judges was even smaller. President Donald Trump, for example, nominated 55 women who were confirmed as federal judges — 24% of his total nominations. President Joe Biden has been much more aggressive in naming female judicial candidates. As of Aug. 1, 2024, Biden had nominated 200 judicial candidates who were confirmed as federal judges. Nearly two-thirds — 63% — were women.

Counting the number of state or local female judges is virtually impossible. There is no central list of judges, much less by gender. But every year the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University does count justices of all the state high courts.

As of May 2024, 43% of all justices on the states’ highest courts were women. One state — South Carolina — had no women among the five justices on its state Supreme Court. That changed in July 2024 when Letitia Verdin joined the court. Another state — Oklahoma — had no women among the five justices on its state Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest court with appellate jurisdiction in criminal cases.

Four states had only one female justice on their highest courts, including Mississippi, with one woman among nine justices. On the flip side, one state — Wisconsin — has a Supreme Court that is nearly all female. Six of the seven justices are women. 

Sources: Federal Judicial Center, Brennan Center for Justice

Source: Federal Judicial Center

Source: Brennan Center for Justice (as of May 2024)

General counsels

Women are also notably absent as the heads of most large corporate legal departments across the country.

As of 2021, only 34% of all general counsels at Fortune 1000 companies — the 1,000 largest companies in the country measured by revenue — were women, according to a survey by the Minority Corporate Counsel Association.

The report explores diversity in 21 different business sectors. In only one sector — food and drug store companies — were a majority of general counsels female in 2021, but that sector was also the smallest of the 21 sectors surveyed. Just six general counsels in that sector were surveyed and four were female.

The largest sector surveyed — financials — was also among the least diverse in terms of gender. Only 29% of the 160 general counsels surveyed in that sector were female in 2021.

Still, the numbers have improved significantly in the past two decades. In 2004, only 16% of general counsels at Fortune 1000 companies were women, according to the MCCA survey. The number has more than doubled since then, standing at 34% in 2021.

Source: Minority Corporate Counsel Association

Source: Minority Corporate Counsel Association