Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported a depressing piece of news about diversity in the legal profession: less than 20 percent of equity partners at major law firms are women. But last week, there was some good news about gender diversity in the law: the editor-in-chiefs of the top 16 law reviews are currently all women.
This kind of development happens because there are countless amazing women attending law school, but it likely also happens because most law reviews have adopted a range of informal and formal policies to increase the gender and racial diversity of their members. In that last two years, however, some of these diversity policies have been challenged in court. Among other things, the lawsuits have claimed that diversity policies decrease the quality of the scholarship that the law reviews publish.
This claim has no empirical support. Jonathan Masur, Kyle Rozema, and I decided to actually study whether the adoption of law review diversity policies changes the rate at which law review articles are cited (which, although flawed, is the standard measure of research quality in academia). We pre-committed ourself to a research design before seeing all the data, used a range of statistical techniques, and we didn’t find any evidence that the adoption of diversity policies produces a drop off in article quality.
So the news that the leading law reviews are now led by women makes me hopefully that the legal profession can make progress increasing diversity overall, and it does not make me remotely worried that we’ll have to sacrifice quality to do so.