For the first time in the history of the United States, women account for most associates at law firms, a most-welcomed sign of the times.
“The National Association-Law Placement (NALP) began tracking law firm diversity data in 1991, 121 years after the first woman graduated law school in the United States,” explains Nikia L. Gray, Executive Director at NALP. “It took 32 years for women to achieve equal, and just slightly greater, representation among associates. Real change is slow, hard, and imperceptible, but it does happen.”
When NALP started to track law firm diversity data in 1991, women accounted for only a little over 38% of law firm associates. According to NALP’s latest report, 50.3% of all U.S. law firm associates were women in 2023. The percentage of associates of colour reached 30.15% in 2023, an increase of 1.8% from 2022. Black and Latina women made up a little over 1% of all partners for the first time.
