Legal Careers, Political Careers, & the Leaky Pipeline of Women to Office

• In Event: Political Ambition

Abstract

In the United States, lawyers are overrepresented in political office. Yet, despite women reaching parity among law school graduates, women with legal backgrounds are particularly underrepresented in political office. Why is it that law schools produce politically ambitious men but not women? We first document the gender gap in lawyers among candidates for local, state, and national office, showing that it is persistent despite the growing supply of women lawyers. We then use surveys of undergraduate students considering law school, graduating law school students, law school alumni, and observational data on career specialization and experiences to understand the sources of this gap. We argue that gendered preferences about power and uneven access to financial resources for men and women produce small gaps before law school. But men’s political ambition is accelerated by training and networks in law school and socialization as lawyers, while women’s law school and employment opportunities push them towards government jobs and non-profit work. Our work contributes to work on how political socialization occurs among adults, the representational consequences of gender gaps in resources, and the persistence of gender roles, even among highly trained professionals.

Authors

• Tiffany D. Barnes, University of Texas at Austin

• Mirya R Holman, University of Houston