Diversifying the Judiciary: The Influence of Gender and Race of Judging

In 1978, political scientist Beverly Blair Cook wrote Women Judges: The End of Tokenism for a publication of the National Center for State Courts. She observed that the national proportion of women judges has matched the national proportion of women lawyers on a time lag basis. She compared the number of women law graduates with the number of women judges, finding that in the 1960s, women composed 1-2% of the legal profession and accounted for 1-2% ofjudges. With women repre- senting 4% of all law graduates in the 1960s, the number of women judges increased to 4% in the 1970s. Cook predicted that with 15% of law classes in the 1970s estimated to be women, 15% of judges would be women in the 1980s, and that states with a large number of women lawyers employed in the 1970s would almost achieve full sex integration by the year 2000