Recent data suggests the gender gap of women’s representation in law may finally be starting to close, but the full story is far more complicated.
In 1869, Arabella Mansfield became the first female lawyer admitted to practice in the United States. It would be another 51 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.
In 2024, more than 150 years later, 41% of practicing attorneys in the US were women in 2024, according to the American Bar Association. Women now outnumber men in law schools, and that gap is widening. If this trend continues, there will eventually be more women than men in our firms and courtrooms.
However, disparities persist for women lawyers. Although there are plenty of female associates, things are still glaringly unequal in the upper echelons of the profession.
In 2025, women are still fighting for fair representation across industries and society more broadly. While the gender pay gap is narrowing, women still earn 85% of what men do on average, according to the Pew Research Center.
Plus, with DEI initiatives having recently fallen out of favor among corporate and government leaders, the path ahead for women in the workplace looks less rosy than it used to.
How We Got Here
Before the implementation of Title IX in 1972, professional schools receiving federal funding were free to refuse admission based on gender, and they exercised this freedom liberally. Many graduate schools accepted only a limited quota of women, meaning females had to significantly outperform the average male to have a chance of getting in. Once the measure passed, though, women’s enrollment in higher education skyrocketed. The trickle of women into professional services quickly became a flood.
Law offers a more straightforward path to qualification than other professions, in that law schools typically accept students with any undergraduate major (unlike fields such as engineering and medicine). Given that young women are now comfortably outpacing young men when it comes to undergraduate degree attainment, it makes sense that more would be entering law school as well.
“I was a Spanish major,” said Nancy Lanard, senior partner and co-founder of Luther Lanard PC, who was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1978. “In my fourth year, I got my master's to teach in education. I thought I was going to teach Spanish. I taught for a short period. I long-term subbed for a teacher that got sick and decided, this isn't for me. So, what are my options now?
“I applied to law school primarily because I thought it opened up a lot of doors. Even if I never practiced law, I thought, well, a law degree gives you a background, a different way of thinking. I didn't necessarily think I was going to practice law.”
While the women of the last five decades have chosen to pursue degree-dependent careers in greater numbers, they have not had the same enthusiasm for physical jobs. According to a 2023 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.2% of working men were in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations, compared to just 1.1% of working women. Professional occupations (such as law), on the other hand, currently employ 32.2% of working women, compared to 22% of working men. This appears to be another reason why female attorneys will soon outnumber male attorneys.
Insiders also believe the industry’s meritocratic nature has helped women to succeed.
“Law gives women space to prove themselves,” said Roy L. Kaufmann, attorney for and president of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act Centralized Verification Service. “The courts do not see gender; they don’t care who wrote the brief. They care if the brief is sharp, relevant, and persuasive.”
The competitive advantage associated with hiring women isn’t only related to the expanded access to talented individuals, but to the greater effectiveness of gender-diverse firms, said Kelly Rittenberry Culhane, co-founder and managing partner of Culhane Meadows PLLC in Dallas.
“You're going to better serve your clients by building strong teams. And if you want to build a strong team, you need to have women.”
The Current State of Play
While much progress has been made to increase women’s representation in the legal industry, there remains a long road to travel. According to the ABA (and to female attorneys themselves), the numbers of female associates and law students is not the only metric we should be focusing on.
In 2023, women accounted for only 28% of the partner positions in American law firms, and 33% of federal judgeships. So, while women are being admitted to practice in greater numbers, they’re having a tougher time making it past the associate attorney level. Why is this?
“We have the babies,” said Culhane. “When we want to start having families, we either get ‘mommy-tracked,’ or we come right back after having babies and suffer almost no work-life balance.”
As a firm founder, Culhane was able to forge her own path to a partnership. However, women working in larger firms who want to reach the partner level and have families as well are running into major roadblocks, she said.
“What often happens is that, while female lawyers take time off after having kids, male associates get taken to go meet their clients, go golfing, go do all the things. Then, at one point, they inherit those clients.
“Women generally miss a lot of opportunities that way. That’s where you see the difference in traditional law firm culture; if the clients don't know you and they're not being introduced to you as the next partner or manager, you won’t get promoted.
“I don't think the bar should be lowered because you had a child or decided to take time off. But we just have to make sure that the opportunities offered should not be biased.”
If the traditional maternity leave structure is a problem, shared parental leave following the birth of a child should go a long way towards breaking the glass ceiling. This is a cultural change that traditional firms may be hesitant to embrace; however, Nancy Lanard believes that men want it as much as women.
“Men have babies. They want to be home when their baby is born,” she said. “They want to be there to see the baby's first steps. They want to be there when their child gets home from school. It's not just women.”
Both Lanard and Culhane mention another potential cultural shift with the power to solve this problem: remote work.
Remote Work
Lanard was a proponent of remote work long before it was cool.
“When I started my first law firm and it started to grow where I needed help [in 2003], it was all-remote and all-female. As long as the work got done, I was fine with that. And if they wanted to work at midnight, as long as the clients were OK with it, I was OK with it.
“This way, if somebody needs to go take their child to the pediatrician or collect them early from school, it's not a problem as long as the clients aren't disrupted by it. And so it's a good way to bring more women into the workforce as attorneys.
“It was a lot harder 22 years ago than it is now. Today, it's not hard at all. There's no excuse.”
Kelly Rittenberry Culhane’s firm has also been remote-first since it was launched in 2013. This, she says, was despite the fact that “clients and lawyers and recruiters said there was no way lawyers could work from home 100% of the time. We wanted to disrupt the way that conventional law firms operated.”
In small, dynamic, and forward-thinking practices like Lanard’s and Culhane’s, remote work (or at least hybrid arrangements) might be relatively easy to allow for. However, in Big Law firms with old-school approaches, this flexibility could take longer.
A number of America’s biggest law firms are mandating that their attorneys spend at least four days a week in the office, according to Reuters. More than half of the respondents to a lawyer survey covering 105 American firms stated that they are required to be in the office at least three days per week.
The Big, Red Elephant in the Room
If flexible working arrangements and reimagined parental leave structures have the power to take gender equality in law to the next level, will Big Law firms start adopting them? Given the current political climate, this is uncertain.
Since the inauguration of President Donald Trump earlier this year, there has been a marked reversal in the prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in government, as well as in the corporate world.
Executive Orders 14151 and 14173 have sought to reframe DEI-based hiring practices as “illegal,” “immoral,” “radical,” and “wasteful.” EO 14151 directed officials to “review and revise, as appropriate, all existing federal employment practices, union contracts, and training policies or programs” so that “DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements” should not come into consideration in hiring processes.
This could have a direct impact on female representation in the federal government’s legal team; more than half of the 44,000 general lawyers currently working for the executive branch are women, according to the ABA.
EO 14173 required private businesses with federal government contracts (including law firms) to make similar changes. In March, Skadden reached a deal with the Trump administration to provide “at least $100 Million Dollars in pro bono Legal Services… to causes that the President and Skadden both support,” according to a post on the president’s Truth Social page. The post also noted that Skadden agreed “not [to] engage in illegal DEI discrimination and preferences” as part of the deal.
The administration has also had legal skirmishes with a number of the nation’s biggest firms (including Coie Perkins, Paul Weiss, and Elias Law Group) over their hiring policies. Some of the firms have filed lawsuits in response to the order, while others have reached deals with the administration, agreeing to modify their hiring policies in line with its stance on DEI.
Of course, it’s too early to say how much of a real impact all this will have on the hiring or promotion of women. Firms could simply scrap their official DEI policies and continue to hire as they always have. In smaller practices, where DEI has never been a major practical consideration, it appears unlikely to change anything.
“I can only speak to my own personal experience, but in terms of the attorneys that I've hired, DEI certainly was not a part of it. Helping women was the biggest motivator,” says Nancy Lanard.
What the Future Holds
So, are women set to take the lead in attorney numbers? It looks very likely. However, according to female lawyers themselves, that’s not the statistic that truly matters. In fact, a narrow focus on the overall numbers of men and women in the profession could obscure a more important consideration.
If the majority of female lawyers never progress past the associate level, women will end up doing an outsized share of the grunt work while men reap the lion’s share of the rewards at the partner level and in the judiciary.
Men still dominate in the boardroom and on the bench; until the business of law allows that to change, female graduation rates from law school will remain a minor consideration. Opportunities for women are plentiful, but true gender equality is still a long way off.
