The facts are frustratingly familiar. In law firms, women are underrepresented at the top and overrepresented at the bottom. For more than 30 years, 50 percent of law school graduates have been women, yet only 18 percent of equity partners are women — a percentage that has barely budged over the past decade. We are tired of talking about the problem.
Yet we cannot afford diversity fatigue when it comes to solutions. That was the premise of the recent Women in Law Hackathon, created by Caren Ulrich Stacey of Diversity Lab in partnership with Stanford Law School and sponsored by Bloomberg Law. Nine teams, each made up of leading partners from around the country and one Stanford Law School student, spent six months working on ideas to close the gender gap in law firms.
