For many years, the number of female law school applicants was on the rise. In the last five years that number has plateaued. Then at last week's Summit in Austin two second tier law school deans mentioned that they received too few female applicants this year to maintain previous gender . This is not a pipeline problem: the majority of college graduates in the last few years have been women. There was speculation that declining applications reflect women's increased interest in business and medicine rather than some problem women have with the legal profession.

Periodically, Kaplan surveys its LSAT-prep clientele. This year's sample of 1,040 students was "about 50/50" male/female respondents, accoridng to Russell Schaffer, Kaplan's Senior Communications Manager. On the face of it that's encouraging - at least half of the folks pursuing LSAT prep courses are women.

40% of respondents said they were motivated to apply to law school by the economic downturn. 67% of respondents said the potential for higher earnng power affected their decision to apply to law school. What's confusing is that that is compared to 73% a year and a half earlier. There's an apples and oranges problem here, because the earlier survey was conducted with a December test pool compared to this year's February test-pool. Still you'd think more people would be concerned about increasing their professional worth in a down economy.

The Kaplan survey also asks about applicants' political aspirations. And despite those eighteen million cracks there's a huge gender gap here: 54% of respondents say they will "definitely" or "probably" run for political office, but only 41% of women fall in this group, compared with 68% of men surveyed.

So what motivates women to go to law school? I went because I wanted to work in public policy and was told that a J.D. was a better door opener than an MPA or an MPP. But my first year of law school my only female professor (Harvard '96) mentioned to me that she was the one of her female law school friends still working. I was in the middle of 1L finals at the time, and the statement felled me. Maybe if I'd heard that stat a few years earlier I never would have made it to law school at all. Is the failure to promote and retain women in the upper echelons of the profession discouraging buy-in at the bottom?

UPDATE: Followed-up last night with Kaplan and got some more gender breakdowns. 35% said they were influenced by the economic downturn - if the gender breakdown is 50/50 then that would be about 10 points lower than the male response rate. On the other hand, roughly the same number of men and women identified earning power as an influence (65% of women, compared to 67% overall, so only about 4 points lower than the guys).