WJI Intern
The American Bar Association has dubbed 2016 to 2026 the “Decade of the Female Lawyer,” but guest speaker Afra Afsharipour began her lecture at Marquette University Law School with a warning against confusing visible progress with real structural change.
Afsharipour, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, presented the Boden Lecture at Marquette on Sept. 23, 2026.
Women now make up a substantial share of law students, associates, faculty members and law school leaders, while corporate America has spent years highlighting the growing number of women in leadership. But Afsharipour urged the audience to look past those numbers and “count the actual seats at the table.”
After decades of progress in getting more women into law, Afsharipour’s lecture raised a question: Once the women are there, who gets the clients?
Her lecture focused less on how many women have entered corporate law and more on what happens once they get there. Who gets the major client? Who controls the deal? Who gets called back for the next one? Afsharipour looked at these questions in the context of mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings (IPOs), and litigation before the Delaware Court of Chancery.
Who controls the deal?
In mergers and acquisitions, numbers of women can look encouraging. More women sit on corporate boards and hold executive positions than in the past.
But women remain less likely than male counterparts to occupy some of the positions most closely tied to major corporate transactions. Women are more often pushed toward areas such as human resources, marketing, and communications, while men remain more heavily represented in corporate development and dealmaking, Afsharipour said.
So being in the room is only part of the story. The other question is who sets the agenda.
The same divide shows up among “outside” lawyers, meaning the law firms hired by corporations. Women remain underrepresented among the outside lawyers leading major mergers and acquisitions, particularly at prestigious firms and on the largest transactions.
Afsharipour connected that divide to pay. She pushed back on the idea that law-firm pay gaps can be explained simply by differences in hours worked. Women who miss out on major deals and important client relationships also miss the work that brings visibility, money and future business. The lawyers who get those opportunities become more attractive choices the next time around because they have more experience, stronger relationships, and a longer record of handling major matters.
How the network reproduces itself
Afsharipour’s research on IPOs offers one of the clearest examples. Lawyers who repeatedly work on IPOs learn more than securities law. They learn how regulators respond to difficult questions, how similar issues were handled in past transactions, and who matters in the field. They also get to know the bankers, executives, and attorneys who keep appearing on major deals.
Afsharipour’s study examined 8,358 IPOs over 22 years and found that the gender gap among IPO lawyers was “virtually unchanged” from 2000 through 2021. Men were far more likely to end up among the most connected lawyers in the field.
Researchers can see those networks by tracking which lawyers repeatedly appear together on transactions. Some names show up again and again, and those lawyers accumulate contacts, information, experience and, often, more work. Women are far less likely to reach those highly connected positions.
That creates a gap that headcounts alone do not show: a firm can employ a large number of women while its most valuable clients and assignments continue to move through networks dominated by men.
Even more women serving as general counsel did not necessarily change who got hired outside the company. Afsharipour found no evidence that companies with women general counsel were more likely to select women for issuer or underwriter legal teams.
Power in Delaware
Afsharipour found a similar pattern in the Delaware Court of Chancery. Delaware is the legal home of a majority of Fortune 500 companies, and its courts hear major disputes involving mergers, shareholders, corporate boards, and governance. A relatively small group of lawyers appears before those courts repeatedly.
Women have become more visible in Chancery litigation, but visibility and influence are not always the same thing, Afsharipour said. On some measures, the median woman had more connections than the median man. At the top of the network, though, men still dominated. Men were more likely to encounter the same male lawyers across different cases, creating what Afsharipour described as a kind of social anchor.
Women also left those networks at higher rates. Afsharipour was skeptical of the idea that those departures could simply be chalked up to lifestyle choices. Women often point to other reasons: not receiving credit for their work, being passed over for major assignments, and lacking the sponsorship needed to move ahead. That shifts the question away from why women leave and toward what they are being asked to stay for.
Changing who gets the opportunity
Afsharipour said firms need to look beyond basic numbers. Instead of counting how many women work at a firm, they can look at who serves as lead counsel, who gets credit for major matters, and who inherits the clients of retiring partners.
She distinguished between mentorship and sponsorship. A mentor gives advice. A sponsor can actually put someone in the room. That can mean bringing a younger lawyer onto an important matter, handing over a client relationship, or using influence to put someone forward for a major opportunity. Those choices often happen informally. A senior lawyer may simply turn to someone he already knows or trusts.
Over time, those decisions shape who gets experience, who develops relationships, and who moves into leadership.
Afsharipour was skeptical that affinity groups alone can fix the problem. They may offer support and community, but they do not control who gets the biggest client or the next major assignment.
Some of that sorting can begin much earlier, with certain law students and young lawyers being encouraged to pursue certain practice areas or firm leadership.
Afsharipour’s arguments moved beyond law-firm diversity. Corporate lawyers do not just advise powerful institutions. They help shape what those institutions do. They negotiate billion-dollar transactions, counsel major companies, and operate inside professional networks that influence the development of corporate law.
Afsharipour warned about what happens when those networks remain too narrow: groups made up of people with similar experiences can fall into groupthink or leave assumptions unchallenged.
Ultimately, Afsharipour’s lecture suggested that the measure of progress should not be how many women enter corporate law, but who gets the client once there.