Although more than 20 percent of Washington-area law partners are female, only 2 percent of partners are black, Hispanic or Asian women, a new study of law firm hiring practices has found.
Minority women continue to struggle to make it to the elite ranks of the legal profession not just in Washington, but nationwide, the National Association for Law Placement found in its annual survey.
NALP is a D.C.-based nonprofit group that studies hiring trends in the legal profession. It has been studying the status of minority women in law firms for 16 years. Their percentages have risen slightly, but very slowly, NALP reports.
D.C.’s figure is better than the national average — slightly less than 2 percent of partners in the country are minority women — but it’s still bleak, NALP Executive Director James Leipold told The Examiner.
“This is a persistent problem,” he said. “There’s a lot of consultants at a lot of law firms trying to figure it out.”
Part of the problem is that minority women either aren’t accepting or aren’t being offered jobs at law firms, the NALP study found: A little more than 7 percent of D.C. law firm associates were minority women. According to statistics kept by the American Bar Association, nearly one-quarter of all law school graduates in 2006-07 were minorities. Leipold said that minority female law graduates outnumber male minority grads nearly 2-to-1.
So where have all the minority women gone?
Leipold and others say that the problem is self-magnifying: Few minority women partners means few mentors for young minority women.
George Washington law professor Stephanie Ridder said mentors are essential to law firm life.
“There’s nobody to take them along. They generally feel pretty excluded,” Ridder said of young minority female lawyers. “They’re given work that’s less interesting and that they’re not taken as seriously as other attorneys.”
Shawnte Mitchell is one minority woman making her way in a big law firm. Mitchell, 31, has worked as an associate at the D.C. office of Ropes & Gray since she graduated from law school four years ago. She agrees that most law firms haven’t “traditionally thought about mentoring” any of their young lawyers, but she said her firm is working hard on it.
“I’ve been able to connect with partners in both the D.C. and Boston offices. I can call them up anytime and ask them a question,” she said.
But Mitchell also said that minority women should be more broad-minded about where they find mentors.
“A mentor can look like anybody,” she said. “They don’t have to look like you.”
