Given all the issues I write about in this newsletter, imagine my surprise when I received a news alert from Reuters announcing that the ABA had just released a report on national lawyer demographics concluding that 2016-2026 was “The Decade of the Female Lawyer.”

Calling that decade the best for women lawyers says more about the years that came before than the last ten. I suppose if you’re comparing 2016-2026 to any decade in the last two-thousand years the most recent one looks considerably better.

But let’s set all cynicism aside and take a look at the data the ABA compiled. In this week’s Comes Now we’re going to review a chapter from the latest edition of the ABA Profile of the Legal Profession to see what makes—and doesn’t make—2016-2026 the Decade of the Female Lawyer.

The Report

The ABA Profile of the Legal Profession is compiled annually based on statistics drawn from “authoritative sources within the ABA and from courts, government agencies, and non-profit groups.” A new chapter of that report took a close look at women in the law.

To be fair, the Reuters headline aside, the ABA did not conclude that 2016-2026 was, in fact, The Decade of the Female Lawyer. Instead, it observed: “When the history of the legal profession is written, 2016 to 2016 may become known as the Decade of the Female Lawyer—a time when the profession started to noticeably shift from a male majority to a female majority.” (Emphasis added.) This noticeable shift included the following:

• In 2016, women became a majority of law school students.

• In 2020, women became a majority of general lawyers in the federal government.

• In 2023, women became a majority of law firm associates.

• In 2024 or 2025, women will likely become a majority of full-time law school faculty members.

The ABA acknowledged that “men still dominate the upper echelons of the legal profession through federal judgeships, state supreme court, law firm partnerships, and corporate counsel positions.”

Moreover, while these shifts are an improvement from 2014 when, for example, only 36% of US lawyers were women, if trends continue as they are, the ABA report points out that it will take twenty years before women are represented 50-50 in the legal profession.

Law School Students

The number of female law students enrolled in ABA-accredited law schools has been growing since 1970. Today, 56% of students are women.

The number of male students has dropped every year since 2010. Meanwhile, the number of female students has increased every year since 2016.

Law School Graduates

Beginning in 2019, female law school graduates outnumbered male law school graduates. In 2023, 55% of all law school graduates were women.

Law Firm Associates

As we’ve discussed before, this year was the first year that women associates outnumbered men associates.

A majority of female law school graduates (58%) choose jobs in law firms. The ABA therefore suggests that, as the number of female law students continues to grow, so too will the number of female law firm associates.

Law Firm Partners

Unfortunately, as we all know, the growth we have seen in the number of women law firm associates has not been reflected in the growth of women law firm partners. As the ABA report candidly admits, the progress of women into the upper echelons of the legal profession—which includes law firm partnerships—is “so agonizingly slow that it is almost invisible.”

In 2023, just 28% of all law firm partners were women.

The percentage of equity partners is even more dismal. In 2020, just 22% percent of equity partners were 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.

Federal Government Lawyers

According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, there are more than 2.2 million employees of the executive branch of the federal government. Of those, nearly 44,000 are categorized as general attorneys. As of December 2023, the majority of those attorneys (51.5%) were women.

The breakdown of where these women lawyers work within the federal government is interesting: Agencies where women lawyers are a majority include the Department of Education (69%), Health and Human Services (66%), Social Security Administration (61%), Labor (63%), Housing and Urban Development (59%), State (59%), Veteran Affairs (58%), Commerce (58%), Interior (56^) Homeland Security (55%), Transportation (54%), and Energy (51%). Women are a minority in the Department of Justice, Defense Department, Army, Navy, and Air Force.

The ABA report did not break down whether or to what extent women attorneys have senior positions in these agencies.

Law School Faculty and Leadership

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. The ABA predicts that, at the current rate of change, that number will probably cross the 50% threshold “in the next year or two.”

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. 

Judges

Just 33% of all sitting Article III federal judges are women. These numbers are only just beginning to get better: 24% of Donald Trump’s nominations were women; 63% of Biden’s were.

As of May of this year, 43% of all justices on the states’ highest courts were women. (There is no way to track the number of state court trial judges.) 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. 

General Counsels

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.

Of 21 different business sectors, only one sector—food and drug store companies—were a majority of general counsels female. Of course, that sector was also the smallest of the 21 sectors surveyed. 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.

Concluding Thoughts

Data are incredibly important for making the case for gender equity, so it’s helpful that the ABA put all of this information in a single location. It’s also important to see it collectively in order to understand the scope of what we are facing before transformative change can occur.

If we are going to call 2016-2026 The Decade of the Female Lawyer, it’s only because it was the first decade in which we saw positive growth in all of the measures discussed above. While positive growth is better than decline, I think it’s dangerous to assume that growth will remain constant just because the data have trended that way the past few years. These numbers will not continue to grow unless the many things we talk about in this newsletter change as well. In short, while women may continue to outnumber men in many areas of the profession, they won’t stay there unless our work environments change.

These days I’m not particularly hopeful—about gender equity in the law or about many other things that are important to me. But as 2024 draws to a close it’s essential to see things as they are to see the work that must be done.

Was anything in this chapter of the ABA report surprising to you?

No Issue on December 3rd

Happy Thanksgiving! So that I can enjoy having my family in town—and my daughter home from college!—there will be no Comes Now on December 3rd. We will pick up the following week.

Share Comes Now!

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please share it with others and encourage them to subscribe. I draft it on Beehiiv (Comes Now (beehiiv.com)) and distribute it on Tuesday evening, but also post the issue as a LinkedIn newsletter on Wednesday mornings.

I also now post Comes Now issues on Instagram! (I just post a link to new issues; I don’t add additional content—yet.) You can find those postings at Comes.Now

Have a topic you’d like me to address? Want to tell me where I got something right or wrong? Send me an email at [email protected].