Career Paths: How Many of Your Classmates Are Still Doing What They Trained to Do?
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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?
I graduated way back in 1988. I haven’t kept up with many of my classmates but I would say most of them stayed in law. A few are BigLaw partners, many of them have their own firms of various sizes. At least one is a retired judge, a couple are or were law professors. Of those who left the law before retirement age, most of them are women.
Of the people I am still close to or have kept track of from my law school years, one is the dean of a law school (amazing story — she got fired by our BigLaw firm while on maternity leave(!) but went on to have arguably the best career of any of us), one got into appellate law and worked part time as a career clerk in our state Court of Appeal and now takes appellate cases very part time, one is a recently retired judge, one has his own successful firm, one is high up in-house at Disney, and a few are BigLaw partners.
Me personally, I left BigLaw after less than a year to go to MidLaw, made partner there and then moved to government after I’d been practicing for 12 years. Most people who made big moves seemed to do it early-ish in their careers, except of course people who go on the bench often do it very late in their careers.
Oh, and one of my male law partners quit after practicing for maybe 10 years and became an elementary school teacher and loved it and recently retired from that.
STEM grad, and only one of my classmates ever worked in the industry we all trained for. Most of us took something outside that field because it paid enough to both eat and afford rent. Some of us made careers out of that first job, others pivoted to other areas.
That’s surprising. What area of STEM? Everyone in my area is in their field except one who left his PhD program to go into consulting.
Chem eng, I think only one of us is a true Chem eng these days and she’s our city’s chief water engineer, so I think of her often and fondly whenever I use our city’s wonder tap water.
I’m in a STEM field that has pretty poor work life balance. Pretty much every woman I graduated with (myself included) changed to adjacent fields when they had kids. The late nights hit different when it means time away from kids. I saw some male classmates make a similar choice, but others doubled down (ex. “it’s just easier on the kids if I come home after bedtime instead of riling them up”). The field doesn’t really need to have long hours, it’s just the culture and it makes it clear the culture was created by (mostly) young men.