Law School Gender Gaps

A new report documents unequal patterns involving gender in law school enrollments -- patterns that relate to employment prospects after law school. Among the findings:

• While women earn more than 57 percent of undergraduate degrees, they make up only 51 percent of law school applicants.
• About 3.4 percent of male college graduates apply to law school, while only 2.6 percent of women do so.
• Male applicants to law school are more likely to be admitted than are female applicants, with admit rates of 79.5 percent for men and 75.8 percent for women. (While men, on average, have higher scores on the Law School Admission Test, women have better college grades.)
• Law schools with the highest job placement rates tend to enroll smaller percentages of women than do law schools with poor job placement rates.

The report was prepared by Deborah Jones Merritt, a professor of law at Ohio State University, and Kyle McEntee, executive director of the group Law School Transparency, which has pushed law schools to reveal more information about job placement to prospective applicants. The full report may be found here.