Women currently occupy nearly half of all the seats in
American law schools, gaining credentials for a professional career once all
but reserved for men. But their large presence on campus does not mean women
have the same job prospects as men.
New graduates of Harvard Law School in May 2015. In the 2015-16 school year, 47 percent of students in top-tier law schools were women; in lower-tier or unranked schools, it was 53.9 percent. Steven Senne/Associated Press
New research indicates that female law students are
clustered in lower-ranked schools, and fewer women are enrolled in the
country’s most prestigious institutions. Such distribution can make a
significant difference in whether female law graduates land legal jobs that pay
higher wages and afford long-term job security and professional advancement.
Women “are less likely than men to attend the schools
that send a high percentage of graduates into the profession,” said Deborah J.
Merritt, a law professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University,
who co-wrote the report called, “The Leaky Pipeline for Women Entering the
Legal Profession.”
This means women “start at a disadvantage” that may
well continue throughout their professional lives, Ms. Merritt said. Despite the
high numbers with law degrees, women hold fewer than 20 percent of partnerships
at law firms and are underrepresented in the higher echelons of law, including
the ranks of judges, corporate counsel, law school deans and professors.
Ms. Merritt and Kyle McEntee, executive director of
the nonprofit group Law School Transparency, decided to examine American Bar
Association data and other official statistics to see why fewer qualified women
made it into the legal profession’s highest rungs even though there has been
general numerical equality in law school enrollment for more than two decades.
They found that the disadvantage for women was created
by more than overall numbers; it began even before law school, when a smaller
percentage of female college graduates applied to law school compared with
similarly credentialed men.
Even though women earn 57 percent of college degrees,
they account for just under 51 percent of law school applicants. And when they
do apply, they are less likely to be accepted. For 2015, for example, 75.8
percent of applications from women were accepted compared with 79.5 percent of
applications by men, according to figures from the Law School Admission
Council, which collects data on the gender and ethnicity of applicants.
There is also a gap depending on a law school’s
national ranking or its job placement success, according to the study.
Over all, 49.4 percent of the country’s nearly 114,000
law school students are women, but that percentage drops at the top 50
nationally ranked schools. Top-tier schools, in the 2015-16 academic year,
enrolled just over 47 percent of women as students compared with lower-ranked
or unranked law schools, which enrolled 53.5 percent women as students,
according to study data.
Law school rankings are sometimes disputed, so the
research team checked the enrollment figures at schools with strong records of
postgraduate employment. Law schools that claimed they placed 85 percent of
their graduates in gold standard jobs, defined as full-time, long-term
positions that require passing the state bar exam, had fewer women enrolled
than men, by about 3 percentage points. The divide was even greater in the next
rung of schools, where 70 to 84 percent of students found jobs requiring bar
passage. The enrollment discrepancy for women was almost 4 percent below men.
In contrast, the lowest-performing schools — the ones
that listed fewer than 40 percent of their graduates in jobs that require bar
passage — had noticeably higher female enrollment, at 55.9 percent of students.
That indicates women who graduate from less prestigious schools have fewer
opportunities to be hired for their first full-fledged legal job, which can be
decisive in shaping a career, Ms. Merritt said.
One reason for the gender gap, Ms. Merritt and Mr.
McEntee said in the report, was that the national rankings have become so
important that the 50 highest-ranked schools “increasingly stress LSAT (Law
School Admission Test) scores over other admissions factors as they fight for better
rankings. This disadvantages women, who have lower LSAT scores (on average)
than men.”
Women score an average of two points lower than men on
the LSAT, which is still the key admissions number. Since law school rankings
are weighted heavily on this number, that discrepancy gives elite law schools a
greater reason — all other things being equal — to accept a man over a woman.
Ms. Merritt also noted that test scores affect
financial aid, which can be crucial in choosing a law school. Prestigious
schools have high tuition, and generous financial assistance helps to defray
those costs, which can easily reach over $100,000. Currently, there is little
transparency in how law schools negotiate tuition assistance and whether there
are gender differences influencing how such sums are distributed, although most
schools admit that they bargain over their overall price tag.
Some law schools that found their rolls seriously
lacking women students have taken active steps to recruit them. Washington
University School of Law in St. Louis, for example, began taking a more active
approach when its 2013 entering class shrank to 38 percent women, a drop from
45 percent the previous year.
“We noticed the dip in women and it was very
disconcerting,” said Nancy Staudt, the school’s dean. “We have stepped up our
efforts through social media and other means, to talk to those considering law
school and those who have been accepted, and we try to find the right fit for
them.”
By 2014, the school, which is 18th in the national rankings,
had an entering class that was 43 percent female. The current 2016 class is 50
percent women, Dean Staudt said.
More deans have been hands-on with recruiting since
law school applicant numbers began to slide and tuition began to climb in
recent years. But while postgraduate employment is more transparent, the
admissions process at the country’s 200-plus accredited law schools remains
murky.
Jay Shively, dean for admissions and financial aid at
Wake Forest University School of Law, said that the admissions process was
“very numbers-driven” and that schools were aware of the repercussions “if they
lose a couple of points on U.S. News,” referring to the U.S. News & World
Report annual law school rankings.
“If you are a top 50 school, I think you have to be
very aware of your medians and how losing a point or gaining a point might
impact your ranking and thus the sort of student that might be attracted to
you,” Mr. Shively said in a podcast produced by Law School Transparency,
released on Wednesday with the research.
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