‘Decade of the female lawyer’: ABA tracks progress, challenges

Earlier this year Katie Bennett was sitting in a deposition when she realized that all of the attorneys and paralegals in the room were women. “The only man in the room was the videographer,” said Bennett, a partner with Minneapolis-based Robins Kaplan LLP. It’s another sign of increasing gender equity in the legal profession.

Her firm recently held a retreat for its women partners, who number more than 20. “Having an event like that signals support of women,” Bennett said.

The American Bar Association recently issued a report on national lawyer demographics calling this “The Decade of the Female Lawyer.”

The ABA’s “Decade” began in 2016, when women first outnumbered men at ABA-accredited law schools; by 2023 they accounted for 56% of the national law student body, with 65,000 women pursuing juris doctor degrees, compared with 50,000 men.

For women attorneys in a historically male-dominated profession, “the initial fight was to get admitted to the bar so they could get positions in the profession and use their J.D., a fight against blatant gender discrimination,” Bennett said. It wasn’t until the 1920s that women were admitted to the bar in every state, Bennett pointed out.

“Some women attorneys may currently face gender discrimination, but it’s hard to see and therefore harder to fight,” Bennett said. “It’s a societal issue that can seep into law firms, clients and jurors across the board.”

Overall, male lawyers still outnumber women attorneys in the U.S. 59% to 41%, the ABA found. But the proportion of women has increased significantly — from 36% in 2014. If current trends continue, the U.S. will have as many women lawyers as male ones within 20 years, according to the ABA.

Some of the increase is attributed to demographics: Older, predominantly male lawyers are continuing to retire while younger, predominantly female lawyers are entering the profession, the report points out.

But women are still lagging men in one important category: law firm partnership ranks, which remain dominated by men, according to data from the National Association for Law Placement (NALP). Women made up about 28% of law firm partners in 2023, an all-time high according to NALP. “Men still dominate the upper echelons of the profession despite the strides we’ve made.” Bennett cited a Michigan Law Review article from 1986 that noted the same trend.

At the associate level, women outnumbered men for the first time in 2023, according to NALP. The percentage of women law firm associates has ticked up steadily almost every year since 1991, when it stood at 38%, the ABA report notes.

Women’s representation among law firm partners has also increased, although more slowly. They accounted for 27.76% of all partners in 2023, and their 1.1-percentage-point gain is the largest NALP has ever recorded year-over-year.

Women make up a majority of law school students in the United States, the ABA report noted: 55.7% in 2022. That’s up from 48.4% in 2000.

Law schools in the Twin Cities reflect the national trend. At the University of Minnesota, in 2023 women made up 53.6% of the total of 675 students. In 2023, of the incoming class of 218 (class of 2026) 60% were women, for the first time in the school’s history. At Mitchell Hamline in St. Paul, 53% of the 1,168 total students are women. At the University of St. Thomas law school, in 2023 61% of the 476 students were women.

In 2023, women made up 49% of full-time faculty at ABA-accredited law schools and are expected to become a majority of the legal professoriate within the next several years, the report notes.

When Amy Seidel started her legal career in the fall of 1998, entry-level law school classes were close to 50-50 men and women students. The biggest change she’s seen over the course of her career is “many more women as partners and in leadership roles,” said Seidel, a corporate partner and leader at Minneapolis-based Faegre Drinker. “When more women see women succeeding, they feel that ‘This is a job and place you can be.’ It’s been a slow evolution, with more and more role models for women.”

There has also been a generational evolution in the marketing that law firms do, Seidel pointed out. They have expanded their efforts beyond traditional male-centric activities such as golf outings and sporting events. “They have gotten more creative in enabling marketing to a wider variety of people. At our firm, we have been doing more family-friendly business development and marketing events. Marketing and business development has been some of what needed to change, to make things more equitable and a lot of firms have been doing a better job of that.”

“We need to be intentional about the teams we’re building and the opportunities being afforded whether through assignments or business development opportunities,” said Bennett, who is “happy to report that my civil rights team at the firm is 50-50 male-female. That means we’re being intentional” in forming teams. “We can build stronger teams and a better work product when everybody is being thought of for those opportunities.”