The Law’s Leaky Pipeline
How Gender Shapes Beliefs About Meritocracy
The Law’s Leaky Pipeline: How Gender Shapes Beliefs About Meritocracy
Dr. Kelly Anthony, PhD
The American legal profession has long presented itself as a meritocracy, an organizational society that rewards individual talents and abilities. The American dream, based on the meritocratic ideal, is the belief that everybody has an equal opportunity to succeed regardless of their demographic characteristics and background. However, in the legal profession many who believe in this meritocratic ideal might not find themselves in such a pleasant dream. Over the past decade more woman (56%) than men (44%) have entered the legal profession, yet the role of trial lawyer, for the last century, has remained unchanged and continues to be heavily male dominated: 84% male, and only 16% female (AO Reports, 2023; ABA, 2024).
The leaky pipeline metaphor provides a useful framework for understanding the challenges women in law encounter today. The leaky pipeline metaphor describes the phenomenon where women in professional fields, like trial law, are disproportionately lost at stages in their career progression, resulting in their over representation at lower levels and under representation at higher levels in the organizational structure, as well as leadership positions (Dunn et al., 2023).
To better understand the reason for this gender disparity, senior elite trial lawyers participated in qualitative interviews and were asked questions about necessary characteristics to be a trial lawyer and gender’s influence on trial lawyer selection, mentoring, and promotion decisions. This study, focusing on the experienced trial lawyers themselves (rather than jurors), examines: (RQ1A) What are the qualifications elite trial lawyers consider essential to be selected to lead a trial; and (RQ1B) how do these characteristics and qualifications reflect trial lawyers’ beliefs about fairness and excellence in the trial profession? (RQ2) What role does gender play in the trial lawyer selection and promotion and how is it implicated in elite trial lawyers’ frameworks of meritocracy. These findings shed light on why men have dominated the trial field for over a century.