After four years of decline, the percentage of associates at law firms who are women rose slightly last year but is still shy of the high mark in 2009, according to newly released data.
According to the National Association for Law Placement, which has been tracking law firm diversity since 1993, just less than 45 percent of associates were women in 2014, compared with slightly less than 39 percent in 1993. The percentage has yet to return to the 45.6 percent level of 2009, when 46 percent of law school graduates were women.
The percentage of associates who are minorities, which fell in 2010 in the wake of the recession, rose for the fourth consecutive year, to 21.6 percent, surpassing the 2009 level, which was 19.7 percent, the association said.
At the highest law firm levels, the percentage of women and minority partners continues to edge up slowly, the association reported. In 2014, 21 percent of partners were women, and 7.3 percent were minorities, which includes African-Americans and Asians. That compares with 19.2 percent for women and 6 percent for minorities in 2009.
The uptick helps to offset the losses women and minority lawyers suffered in the wake of the 2008 recession, when efforts to recruit and retain a diverse body of lawyers became less of a priority.
“Minority associate figures dropped following widespread associate layoffs in 2009,” said James G. Leipold, the association’s executive director.
Some of the gains for women may be somewhat misleading, according to the report, because more are taking positions that are not at the partner or associate level but are less permanent “of counsel” and other jobs. These accounted for 13 percent of attorney jobs at law firms in 2014.
“We’re still in the same position we’ve been in,” said Jennifer A. Waters, executive director of the National Association of Women Lawyers, a membership group. “There’s progress, but things are moving at a snail’s pace.”
One of the biggest variations in lawyer ranks is geographic, the report found. “Minorities have a much larger representation in law firms in larger cities, for example, although our figures show incremental increases for women and minorities between 2013 and 2014.”
In the 40 cities with the highest numbers of lawyers, the percentage of partners who are women is about 12 percent in Salt Lake City but reaches 28 percent in Denver and more than 25 percent in Detroit, San Francisco and Seattle. It is 18.8 percent in New York.
Percentages of minority partners range from less than 0.5 percent in the Raleigh/Durham, N.C., area to a high of 29.5 percent in Miami. It is 7.7 percent in New York.
The group that is the most underrepresented is minority women associates, which increased 0.5 percentage point, to 11.5 percent, last year, according to the report. Last year, only 2.5 percent of minority women were partners, compared with just less than 5 percent for minority men.