Infobit: Since 1985, law schools have been graduating classes of new lawyers that are 40% or more female. Yet in 1996, only 14.2% of law firm partners were women, and in 2005, only 17.2% were women. (Note: this figure is for all partners; the number of equity partners is lower.) Source: Catalyst. At this rate of increase, women should make up half of law firm partners by the year 2115.

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Professor Joan C. Williams, prize-winning author and Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of the Law, is the director of WorkLife Law and co-director of the Project on Attorney Retention (PAR). The author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford, 2000) she was awarded the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. She has been widely quoted in the press, in publications as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Parenting Magazine, Working Mother and O, and has appeared in other media, including CBS Nightly News, CNN, CSPAN, The Diane Rehm Show, Public Interest, and Talk of the Nation. She was featured on the PBS documentary, Juggling Work and Family, with Hedrick Smith. The author of one of the most cited law review articles ever written, and roughtly 50 other law review articles, she has had articles excerpted in casebooks for six different subjects. She has taught at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and UC Hastings law schools, and has lectured widely, including at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Cornell, Duke and more than a dozen other law schools, and in Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala and Peru.