Linda Greenhouse on "Is the Pipeline Half Full or Half Empty?"

Pulitzer-prize winning author Linda Greenhouse is kicking off the Symposium with her thoughts on "Is the Pipeline Half Full or Half Empty?"  Here are a few facts that she is using to frame her remarks:

• Of 163 active federal judges, 30.1% are women.  In the 8th Circuit, there is only one woman.  The Obama administration has made progress in nominating women to the bench.
• Women occupy 32% of the seats on the states' highest courts.
• Women held 55% of state clerkships in 2010.
• Women are 15% of equity partners at law firms, a number that has not changed in 20 years.
• In legal academia, women are 1/2 of all assistant professors, but less than 1/3 of full professors.

Ms. Greenhouse cautions against gender essentialism but also asks, "What does this all mean?" 

Comments

[John Steele]

Bridget, thanks for posting. I follow the inclusion/exclusion discussions pretty closely and those first two stats jumped out at me, because the ~30% figure is also the percentage of women in the legal profession as a whole. As for that 15% stat, is that some subset of the larger firms (AmLaw 100, AmLaw 200, NLJ 250) or for all private practice firms regardless of size?

[Bridget Crawford]

I must have missed that detail, so we'll wait to read Ms. Greenhouse's piece in the MSU Law Review. My apologies.