Dive Brief:
- Law schools have increasingly sorted along gender lines, and the makeup of faculties has become a reflection of schools' student population, according to preprint research published on the SSRN, an open access platform for early-stage research.
- Before 1970, the gender breakdown of a law school’s faculty was not highly correlated with its student body, but the relationship has grown stronger in the decades since, researchers found. Now, if a law school has more female faculty members, it's likely to have more women as students.
- Higher-ranked schools have tended toward fewer women faculty members since the 1980s. In 2020, U.S. law schools with a national ranking of 51 or lower, known as Tier 3 schools, had roughly the same number of male and female professors. But law schools consistently ranked 14 or higher, Tier 1 schools, only had about two female professors for every five male professors.
Dive Insight:
Law schools enrolled virtually no women through the first half of the 20th century. But the 1960s saw a number of cultural and policy changes, such as federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination in certain types of work and colleges removing rules barring women from the classroom.
After that, the number of female law students grew rapidly through the early 1970s, researchers wrote. In 1960, no U.S. law school enrolled more than 20% women. By 1975, over 90% of schools enrolled between 20% and 40% women.
But the percentage of women enrolled in law schools stabilized shortly thereafter. By 2000, women still hadn't achieved parity with men in enrollment at the higher ranked schools, despite women being 56.1% of college students overall that year.
A fair amount of research exists on the law schools that were most welcoming to women, according to Elizabeth Katz, an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the paper's authors. But that leaves a gap in context, she said.
"Fewer people want to study the law schools that have a bad record," said Katz. "But of course, that's a really important part of the story to understand as well."
And it's important to note where women are being admitted to law school today — not just if they are admitted. Using data from the American Bar Association, researchers broke down law school enrollment since 1948 by gender. They also combined faculty data from the ABA and the Association of American Law Schools.
In the early 2010s, some schools had equal shares of male and female students, but others had only 35% women. By the end of the decade, the average number of women law students had increased overall, but the set of schools with the lowest share of female enrollment remained at just 35% women.
Women in law professorships and dean positions lagged further behind, with their representation growing more slowly than that of students. Faculties experience lower turnover than student bodies and have far lower numbers anyway. With less movement, there's less room for change.
Progress toward gender parity in law schools is being made, it's just slow moving, researchers found. But as the number of female students and faculty increases, college leaders should continue diversity efforts aimed at women, according to Katz.
"The trends are clearly very positive, but they reflect deliberate policy goals that have been implemented over decades," she said. "There's a lesson, I think, about being attentive to the kinds of positions women are filling and thinking about the pipeline."
