The ATL Law Firm Gender Diversity Index (2016)
The ATL Law Firm Gender Diversity Index is the most comprehensive and accurate database of its kind available anywhere.
Year in and year out, we watch law firm after law firm pay lip service to their commitment to diversity in the legal profession, with promises to put women attorneys on equal footing with their male counterparts, whether it be through hiring and retaining more women attorneys, promoting more women attorneys to partner, or providing more leadership positions to women attorneys. Despite these assurances, little meaningful progress has been made to improve women’s stature in the law.
How, then, can we truly compare law firms to see which ones have actually succeeded in their gender diversity efforts? While several companies have attempted to study or rank law firms on the basis of gender diversity in the past based on survey results, none have collected raw data regarding the state of the legal market — until today.
We have teamed up with NavForward to categorize every lawyer in the top 1,200 firms in the country to create the ATL Law Firm Gender Diversity Index, the most comprehensive and accurate database of its kind available anywhere. The data in this study is from December 2014, and includes promotions from the entire 2014-2015 cycle (data from the 2015-2016 cycle is not included, as that cycle is not yet complete).
We’ve graded these law firms on a scale from A+ to C, based on total number of attorneys, percentage of female attorneys, percentage of female associates, percentage of female partners, and percentage of female promotions from associate to partner. We’ve further broken this list down by region, with rankings for the following markets: Atlanta; Boston; Chicago; Houston; Los Angeles; New York; Philadelphia; San Francisco; and Washington, D.C.
Congratulations to the top six firms in our overall gender diversity stats:
| Firm Name | Total Attorneys | % Female Attorneys | % Female Associates | % Female Partners | % Female Promotions | Grade |
| Ballard Spahr | 521 | 38 | 51 | 26 | 60 | A+ |
| Crowell & Moring | 461 | 38 | 56 | 22 | 56 | A+ |
| Fennemore Craig | 186 | 36 | 47 | 31 | 67 | A+ |
| Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy | 406 | 62 | 69 | 50 | 71 | A+ |
| Manatt, Phelps & Phillips | 390 | 33 | 54 | 26 | 100 | A+ |
| Quarles & Brady | 483 | 36 | 49 | 28 | 53 | A+ |
We’ve classified 200,000 attorneys — how does your law firm measure up?
To find out, click here to access the ATL Law Firm Gender Diversity Index.
