At a higher-ranked law school, 80% of graduates will go into private practice, about evenly split by gender. What the prospects are at the other end has a big impact on the people coming in.

As to what law firms do—they do about the same thing any Big Corp. does, and it works out at the entry level (at least as to gender) because the pool of applicants is gender balanced. The more interesting question is how they got there. There was a strong push in the 1980s and 1990s to simply hire more women, to make up for the fact that the profession was 95% men due to past discrimination. The whole industry did this, from law schools to law firms to the judiciary.

And it ended up being largely self-perpetuating. While law still faces challenges retaining more senior women, there is a critical mass (probably a third of potential clients as well as judges are women) such that qualified left-brained women aren’t turned away from the field because they don’t want to put up with a 10:1 ratio.

Now you can debate about whether two wrongs make a right, but realize that’s a different point than what I was replying to. If you’re in a highly gender-skewed industry that hasn’t tackled the effects of past discrimination, you’re not getting the best of the best. You’re limiting half your potential talant pool to the subset of people who are willing to put up with the hassle of being a minority in their field.

why do you think the push to hire more women is the reason for the current gender balance in law hiring rather than a simple increase in the number of women choosing to pursue legal qualifications? there is a huge push to hire more women in tech yet it has done little so far to change the balance. there is certainly no hard barrier on women pursuing a tech career as there was for women pursuing a career in corporate law before the 80s.

There hasn’t been a huge push. What law firms did in the 1980s and 1990s was basically decide “we’re going to hire an equal number of men and women.” Eventually, women came to see law as a career women could pursue because there were lots of women in the profession. There were other women to be mentors and role models and friends. Eventually, the need for affirmative measures evaporated.

Having done both, I just find it difficult to believe that substantive preference (rather than the preference not to be in a single gender environment) has anything to do with it. I’m surrounded by highly analytical left brained women who dissect mortgage backed securities for a living. I think they would’ve been great programmers. But the path to being a programmer starts with being the only girl in your high school CS class, and that’s a huge disincentive.

> There hasn’t been a huge push. What law firms did in the 1980s and 1990s was basically decide “we’re going to hire an equal number of men and women.”

If this is true, then there must have been a lot of women coming out of law schools in the 1980s and 1990s. Otherwise, law firms in general could never hire and equal number of men and women. It's statistically impossible.

Whereas there are only a very small percentage (<10%) of women now graduating with CS and software engineering majors.