Career Paths: How Many of Your Classmates Are Still Doing What They Trained to Do?

I had dinner with an old friend from law school last week, and we found ourselves doing what old classmates always seem to do: trying to remember where everyone ended up. Who made partner? Who became a judge? Who moved in-house? Who seems to spend half the year posting from fabulous vacation homes on Instagram? (Good for her!)

One thing that struck me was how many of the women we knew were no longer practicing law (myself included). It reminded me of something I'd read years ago: women have made up more than half of law school classes for quite a while now (apparently since 2016!), but several years into practice, they become much harder to find in the traditional legal career pipeline.

Obviously, people leave for all kinds of reasons. Some switch careers, some stay home with children for a while, some build businesses, some move into adjacent fields, and some simply decide practicing law isn't what they want to spend their lives doing. (I also wonder if maybe those who move to smaller law firms are harder to track!)

It made me wonder whether this is unique to law, or whether medicine, consulting, accounting, engineering, academia, finance, and other professions see the same thing.

Some questions for today:

• If you think back to your graduating class (whether from college, graduate school, law school, medical school, business school, etc.), roughly what percentage of people are still working in that profession?
• Did you notice a point where a lot of people seemed to leave? (Was there a “five-year mark,” or did departures happen at various points?)
• Were the people who left mostly women, mostly men, or about evenly split?
• If you left your original profession, what pulled you toward something else?
• Do you think your profession has gotten better at retaining women than it was 10 or 20 years ago?

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