Women now make up the majority of associates at law firms for the first time since the National Association-Law Placement (NALP) started tracking law firm diversity data more than 30 years ago, outpacing men in the metric.
The annual report released Tuesday, based on information from the 2023 NALP’s Directory of Legal Employers (NDLE), showed that 50.3 percent of all U.S. law firm associates were women last year.
“NALP began tracking law firm diversity data in 1991, 121 years after the first woman graduated law school in the United States,” NALP Executive Director Nikia L. Gray said. “At that time, women accounted for only a little over 38% of law firm associates. It took another thirty-two years for women to achieve equal, and just slightly greater, representation among associates – 153 years in total. Real change is slow, hard, and imperceptible, but it does happen.”
The report showed that women reached a higher number of partnership positions at the firms, with 27.76% of all partners being women — a 1.1 percentage point increase, the largest year-to-year increase NALP has recorded yet.
The percentage of female associates is still nearly double that of partners.
Another record-shattering increase was in the percentage of associates of color, which jumped to 30.15 percent in 2023, a 1.8 percentage point increase in 2023, according to NALP data.
Black and Latina women each made up at least 1 percent of all partners for the first time, a percentage spike although women of color still only account for less than 5 percent of all partners.
Despite the increases in diversity across multiple categories, the percentage of associates of color dipped for the first time since 2017, to 42.27 percent, according to NALP data.