After graduating from DePaul University College of Law in 1997, Michelle Orton practiced residential real estate law for 14 years.

And then she had a daughter and realized very quickly that children and legal work aren't very compatible. She did try, however. When her older child was 1, she switched to a 40-hour workweek.

But when she had her son a couple of years later, she realized that her revised schedule was too inflexible. "Even at 40 hours, it was too hard to take care of my kids," Orton says. “It seemed like my daughter was with the nanny the whole time, and by the time I traveled to work and home, especially when they were going to bed early, there was no time to spend with them.”

She ended up switching gears and becoming a realtor, working 20 to 30 hours per week. Still, Orton missed the law, and when her children were 17 and 20, she joined a small law firm. She gets paid less than she did nearly two decades earlier, and she's still paying off her law school student loans, but she's a lawyer again.

Orton's trajectory is one that many female attorneys are trying to navigate as they attempt to balance work and life. While this balance, along with the fate of women in the field, has improved, there's still much more work to be done.

More than four out of 10 attorneys in the United States are women, according to the ABA Profile of the Legal Profession 2024, and 56% of law school students are women. (The shift began around 1970, when women made up only 9% of law students in the United States. At the time, law schools—and the legal field as a whole—were overwhelmingly male-dominated). As a result, from 2019 to 2023, there were 12,175 more women awarded law degrees than men. And in some law schools, the female professors outnumber the male professors significantly: Widener University Delaware Law School (73%); Western New England School of Law (70%); University of Detroit Mercy School of Law (68%); North Carolina Central University School of Law, Roger Williams University School of Law and Vermont Law and Graduate School (67%). If the trends persist, the study finds, male and female attorneys could be represented 50-50 in the legal profession as soon as 2026.

However, men still overwhelmingly dominate when it comes to rising through the ranks, as only 28% of law firm partners were women in 2023. That figure marks a slow and steady improvement from 2013, when it was only 20%. Representation in law firm leadership is also low, with women being just 12% of managing partners, 28% of governance committee members and 27% of practice group leaders.

That gender gap extends to the bench, as women made up only 33% of sitting Article III federal judges and 43% of state supreme court justices in 2024, according to the ABA report. You also won't find many women as general counsels: A 2021 survey by the Minority Corporate Counsel Association reported just 34% of general counsels at Fortune 1000 companies were female (in 2004, only 16% were).

"I'm encouraged by the progress we've made in increasing the representation of women in the legal profession, but there's still more to be done to ensure that women have opportunities for advancement and leadership roles," says Karen Richardson, the Vermont-based executive director of the National Association of Women Lawyers.

The biggest obstacles that can disrupt law career trajectories are compensation, performance evaluations, promotions and succession, she says.

Compensation has long been considered a simple indicator for equality in the workplace, but industrywide data has captured the persistence of gender pay gaps at all stages of an attorney's career, Richardson says.

"Even at the entry level, women are paid less than men, and these gaps often grow as women and men advance to partnership, with the largest gaps occurring between equity partners," she says.

According to a 2024 survey by recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, the average pay for male partners was nearly $1.7 million in 2023, which is 29% higher than that of female partners, who averaged just over $1.2 million. However, the pay difference appears to be shrinking. The firm's 2022 survey found the pay difference between men and women was 34%. The salaries for both men and women have increased by 37% since the 2022 survey.

Meanwhile, according to the ABA report, the average lawyer salary, not including profits for law firm partners or shareholders, was $176,470 in 2023, a rise from 2021 when it was $148,030. But if you look at the pay differential at different incomes, it's clear that men dominate higher pay brackets when compared with women.

Richardson attributes these numbers to exclusion, biases and underrepresentation. "Even subtle biases or disparities built into the above-mentioned bias-prone areas can accumulate in ways that derail the career trajectories," she says.

Another issue is that prime earning years often coincide with prime child-raising years, explains K.M. Zouhary, the principal of KMZ Advisors and an advisory board member with the New York University School of Law Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center.

Law firms can help by embracing offboarding and onboarding for those taking parental leave and encouraging all associates to take their family leave. When Ann Palma, an Oak Park, Illinois-based intellectual property counsel for Saint-Gobain, a producer of construction materials, had a child in 2018, she closed out all of her work before her due date but didn't end up giving birth until after 41 weeks. That left her with 2½ weeks of billable hours she couldn't fill. Plus, two matters settled during her maternity leave, which left her out of touch when she returned to the office.

"When I came back, it was up to me to figure out what I was going to work on," she says. “It was a real struggle to get my hours back up: I was a new person—having a child rocks your world more than many men understand.”

Some women don't quite get it, either. Portia Britt had always snubbed her nose at the notion that having kids would affect her work life.

That was, however, pre-child. In August, the associate county counselor for the St. Louis County Counselor's Office and the ABA Young Lawyers Division assembly clerk had her first child, and her prior beliefs were instantly tossed out the window. After taking her 12 weeks of maternity leave, she had a few revelations: She realized how expensive day care is (the average family spends between $6,500 and $15,000 annually on day care, with those in large cities paying significantly more, according to the U.S. Department of Labor); and she noticed how difficult it was to work while having children.

Britt, who spoke by phone with the ABA Journal a week after returning to work, was already nervously anticipating her upcoming schedule, which would include depositions and deposition prep that would most likely keep her working until dawn. "It's very emotionally draining," she says.

Still, Britt says that since she's working for a very understanding supervisor who allows her to work from home as needed, she's in a better position than most other female attorneys.

For instance, Julianne Piotrowski had to leave work completely in 2006 after having the first of her three children.

"I wanted to work from home for a while, and while they kind of allowed me to do that for almost a year, they then wanted me back in the office," Piotrowski says. "This is an example of misogyny: Guys were able to go golfing during the day, but if I left to spend time with family, it was perceived differently."

She was planning to take only five years off, but that turned into 15, and when Piotrowski was ready to return, she had to start at square one. She opened her own law firm in 2022 and is grateful for the freedom it allows her.

She agrees that having exit and entrance ramps are essential. "Firms have always gone the route of, ‘You can be counsel, or you can take time off and come back to your position,'" Piotrowski says. “But being able to ramp up seems to not be present in a lot of firms.”

Men and women may benefit from tailored business strategies, says Kathryn "Katie" Nadro, a partner in Levenfeld Pearlstein's corporate group. Historically, law firms have been structured in a way that works for men but less so for women, Nadro says. Recognizing that there are different needs and abilities and then putting a policy into place to accommodate those differences and help everybody flourish would really be beneficial, she says. But President Donald Trump's executive order attempting to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives could curb law firm efforts to be more accommodating and inclusive to women.

When she started at Levenfeld Pearlstein in 2024, one of the selling points for her was its focus on DEI and flexibility. Coming from a smaller firm where this wasn't as common, Nadro says she is grateful that today she doesn't have to push for a longer parental leave policy, nor does she need to emphasize the importance of mentors and networking specifically for women.

Levenfeld Pearlstein has a women's group responsible for networking, mentoring opportunities and promoting business development.

"Retaining talent from all walks of life, and making sure they're moving up the ranks so they become the decision-makers is still the best way forward," Nadro says.

Still, for those reasons and more, women are leaving law firms at higher rates than men. According to the ABA study, 71% of male attorneys said they were satisfied with the recognition they received at work, but only 50% of women did. Plus, half of female attorneys said they experienced unwanted sexual conduct at work.

A major issue persisting today is the lack of female partners. "The people who make the determinations are generally not women, who would be in the room advocating for other women," says Karol Corbin Walker, a partner at Kaufman Dolowich and chair of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession. She adds that women often lack sponsors or mentors to help adovcate for their cause, leading to the people in charge simply falling back on their natural biases.

Perhaps the biggest natural bias is that women are expected to be the default parent and caregiver—a task that can be difficult to perform while working long hours.

"It's very hard for women in most practices to simultaneously raise a family and progress up through the ranks in BigLaw, especially when women are the primary caregiver in the family," says Kent Zimmermann, the strategic advisor to law firm leaders at Zeughauser Group.

One way to lessen the gap at the top would be to change the way attorneys are reviewed, Zouhary says. Performance reviews can more broadly assess leadership ability if law firms recognize the skills future partners will need beyond rigorous analysis and client development, such as emotional intelligence, the ability to act on tough feedback, courage when faced with tough decisions, and the ability to both create and develop teams.

"These are capabilities many women, because of their circumstances or ambitions, demonstrate in spades but are often overlooked in the partnership analysis," Zouhary says. "By acknowledging these skills, firms can recognize and reward the various forms in which leadership is presented."

Raya Bogard, owner and founder of the Bogard Law Firm, says she's been called a paralegal by a senior partner at a previous firm, and she's been told, "If you're not sitting here ... where I can see you, you're not working."

Comments like those made her give up on attempting to rise through the ranks at larger firms, so in 2017, she started her part-time solo practice while doing independent contract work for a female-owned firm. She sets her hours, works from home as needed and gets the work done while simultaneously caring for her family.

Many women have taken it upon themselves to help make their firms more accommodating for women. Joanna Horsnail, the Chicago office managing partner at Mayer Brown, was determined to keep her career on track as a working mother. So she, along with a few other women, founded a women's forum for her firm, which has grown to include forums for other offices. One of their priorities was to make sure working moms were aware of the opportunity to take advantage of the firm's alternative work schedules, which are available to all female and male attorneys at the firm. When Horsnail was on maternity leave, she made partner despite making a 70% time commitment at 70% pay when she returned. After having a severely disabled child two years later, she managed to maintain her 70% schedule/salary and not working on Fridays for five years so she could stay at home to care for her children.

To do this, Horsnail says, she took on fewer projects and was grateful for the support she received from others in the firm. While she's pleased with the way she negotiated her flexible schedule, Horsnail says firms need to continue getting women into decision-making positions.

"There's naturally going to be empathy there if you've been there yourself: Needing to juggle commitments at home with the events and meetings," Horsnail says. Other things her firm does to help women function well in the office include subscribing to Milk Stork, a service that transfers a woman's breast milk where needed at the firm's cost; and Phoebe, which offers one-on-one executive coaching and peer mentoring circles for women transitioning back to work after maternity leave.

"We continue to push to meet people where they are and to understand that their success can look like a number of different things," Horsnail says. "Don't base success solely on how many bills you sent out this month, and instead look at the longer-term career."

Palma focuses on recognizing women to lessen the gender gap. She does this by choosing women whenever possible and giving them credit for their work. Men traditionally bring on other males to the law firms and pass work down to them.

"I make it a point to make sure that I'm telling outside counsel, ‘I'm selecting a female,'" she says.

Trailblazing women in the legal field often rise alone, KMZ Advisors' Zouhary says, but women need women to break into that boys' club. A powerful next step, she adds, would be to teach mentorship and sponsorship skills as part of the law school curriculum. This would include how to create and build relationships that sustain a career and bring others along. This peer mentorship can help lawyers celebrate accomplishments, find new opportunities, and retain a sense of self and strength.

Lauren Barnes Williams, secretary for the ABA Young Lawyers Division, remembers a woman saying that she would never be partner because she has children. This statement, Barnes Williams says, is why mentorship is so important.

"When you see someone who looks like you doing it, you start realizing that this is possible for you too," she says.

Barnes Williams, who grew up in Newport News, Virginia, says she didn't meet any attorneys until the end of her college career—and seeing a female attorney was out of the question. It was only after she learned about U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson that Barnes Williams realized she could not only become an attorney but also rise to the highest court.

The younger generations coming out of law school today have different role models, perspectives and flexibility that this millennial generation is demanding. This gives Piotrowski hope for the future.

"I'm hoping that the combination of those factors make it possible for women to stay and become partners and managing partners while having a family and being present in their community life," Piotrowski says.

Britt also says she's optimistic about the future, though hard work needs to happen to get it done.

"When I look around at the ABA and the ABA leadership, as my peer group is starting to move into partner roles, I'm seeing more diversity," she says. "The legal landscape as we've known it throughout U.S. history will look significantly different 20 years from now."