Gender Disparity in Civil Trial Teams and Leadership Roles

According to the American Bar Association, the number of female law students has increased since 1970, where female law student enrollment numbers have gone from just 9% to 56% as of 2024. With the closing gap of gender disparity in law school, it would be assumed that the same pattern would be reflected in the workforce; however, research has shown that this is not entirely the case. As of 2023, the proportion of female attorneys at law firms (50%) and in government (52%) nearly matches the law student enrollment proportions, but there are concerns about the gender gap in certain areas of practice, such as trial, and in leadership roles.

Phalen and colleagues (2024) decided to test this concern. They hypothesized that women would be underrepresented on trial teams and in leadership roles compared to men, that gender disparity would be more prominent in regions with stronger bias for traditional gender roles compared to regions with weaker bias, and that gender disparity in representation and leadership roles would decrease over time. Using 655 recorded civil trials through the Courtroom View Network, the researchers coded the cases for perceived gender of the attorneys based on names and region of the country. Researchers defined leadership role as an attorney giving an opening or closing statements. Finally, researchers used gender bias scores from federally-defined regions as their regional gender bias measure. Gender bias scores came from the Implicit Association Test, an online bias test from Harvard’s Project Implicit that asks test-takers to quickly respond to patterns.

As predicted, women were underrepresented on trial teams and in leadership roles. Only 17% of all trial attorneys were women (12% plaintiff, 22% defense). Additionally, only 12% of women attorneys gave an opening or closing statement. As expected, this disparity was greater in regions with stronger bias towards traditional gender role (16% women) than in regions with less gender bias (19% women).

Despite the low representation of women in trial teams, the findings suggest that the rates are improving over time.  Women made up 15% of trial attorneys from 2005-2009, 16% from 2011-2014, and 19% from 2015-2019. However, gender diversity in leadership positions only increased over time when looking at implicit bias instead of explicit bias. Instead, there is stronger evidence to suggest that gender diversity in leadership positions is dependent on regional traditional gender bias.

Although gender diversity has increased significantly in law schools over the past 50 years, there is still a large gap in female representation and leadership roles in the legal workforce. The results from Phalen and colleagues' study are promising- gender diversity in trial teams will increase as time passes. Even though progress may not happen as quickly as hoped, it is important to continue addressing the biases and issues within these systems to ensure equal opportunity across all future legal workers.