Women and Court Leadership – Statistics

  1. Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators – Number of Women Members:

Year / CCJ / COSCA
1984 / 1 / 3
1994 / 4 / 8
2004 / 21 / 17
2014 / 22 / 23

Current Ohio Interim SCA – Mindi Wells (not counted in total)

  1. Women Justices Serving on State Appellate Courts:

Year / Courts of Last Resort
Women Total / Intermediate Appellate Courts
Women Total / All Appellate Courts
Percentage of Women
1985 / 23 / 338 / 49 / 704 / 7%
1998 / 93 / 350 / 194 / 912 / 23%
2014 / 126 / 364 / 330 / 962 / 34%
  1. Women Enrollment in the ICM’s Fellows Program (formerly CEDP):

Year / Women / Total Class Size / Percentage of Women
1974 / 2 / 33 / 6%
1984 / 10 / 27 / 37%
1994 / 7 / 14 / 50%
2004 / 6 / 12 / 50%
2014 / 17 / 19 / 89%
  1. National Conference of Metropolitan Courts (NCMC):

from Gordy Griller:

I wish I could give you some comparative statistics, but there is little historical data even though NCMC is one of the oldest national court improvement organizations in the nation. NCMC was originally founded in 1963 by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark and a small collection of urban court presiding judges and court executives. To my knowledge the founders and early membership were small in number and all male. Going that far back, it included some of the first court administrators in the nation,namely Ed McConnell (NJ), Ed Gallas (LA Superior Court), David Saari (PA), and Gordon Allison (Phoenix).Today, roughly 25 percent of NCMC’s 100 members are women court leaders. There may be a larger percentage of women who are top metro court leaders in the nation, but since the organization is a voluntary one there are many courts that are not members. Part of our problem in recruiting presiding and chief judges is that those in leadership change often and at different times during the year (i.e. calendar year, fiscal year, election cycles, etc.). The common term for an urban court chief judge generally ranges from 2-3 years. Unlike the Conference of Chief Justices and Conference of State Court Administrators, membership in NCMC is primarily person-based, not position-based. That is something we would like to change, but it is triggered by the politics of individual courts and quite difficult to alter.

Also, many states have initiated leadership training programs for top trial court judges so some of our potential members wonder what they could possibly learn from a national association of chief judges. We contend, however, that the problems of large, urban multi-judge courts are somewhat unique vis-à-vis smaller courts due to their size, specialization, organizational dynamics, resource capacity, and ability to experiment. And, in many instances, the programs, projects and processes occurring in a metro court in one state are similar to those in another state regardless of state laws and local customs because size tends to generate common approaches to caseflow. So, many metro courts have jumped ahead by replicating approaches used by their urban court counterparts in another state.

One positive assertion that unequivocally shows the progress of women as NCMC leaders is the fact that of the last 6 NCMC Presidents, 4 have been women; only 2 have been men.

  1. National Association for Court Management (NACM):

(*Membership rolls only went back to 2000)

Year / Women Members / Total Members / Percentage of Women
2000 / 1,415 / 2,463 / 57%
2014 / 1,044 / 1,743 / 59%
  1. A Current Glance at Women in the Law (Feb. 2013) – ABA

Chart below from page 5:

Chart below from page 6:

  1. Women in Law Schools

  1. Published in The Judges’ Journal, Volume 48, Number 3, summer 2009. © 2009 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.