In many aspects, Mandie Landry (D-Louisiana House) is an ordinary legislator: she is well-educated, raised in the area she represents, and engages in a wide set of outreach and constituent communication. Yet, in other ways, she is unusual. Rep Landry was the first person in her family to go to college, the first to get a law degree, and the first to seek political office. She is one of 29 women (and just 11 Democratic women) in the Louisiana House of Representatives. Her background in law, which is generally very common among legislators and those in the Louisiana Legislature, makes her unusual among women in political office.
Lawyers play a central role in every political system in the United States. The United States has a million lawyers in practice, with more than 50,000 men and women graduating from law schools every year. Members of the legal profession are actively involved in justice and law-making systems, serving as judges, prosecutors, city council members, mayors, state legislators, members of Congress, vice-presidents, and in a variety of additional legislative, executive, and judicial positions (Makse Reference Makse2019; Bonica Reference Bonica2020; Gleason Reference Gleason2020; Hansen and Clark Reference Hansen and Clark2020; DeWitt Reference DeWitt2021). Law school is not only the most common professional degree obtained in the United States, but it also represents a primary pipeline to political office (Makse Reference Makse2019; Thomsen and King Reference Thomsen and King2020).
Although scholars have carefully documented the ways networks and resources help explain lawyers’ overrepresentation (Bonica Reference Bonica2020; Sevi, Blais, and Mayer Reference Sevi, Blais and Mayer2020; Gulzar Reference Gulzar2021), we know less about political ambition among lawyersFootnote 1 and how lawyers view legal careers and political office as pieces of a broader career ecosystem (Diekman and Steinberg Reference Diekman and Steinberg2013). In this article, we argue that one reason people go to law school is because they are interested in a career that fulfills agentic goals, or goals that focus on influence, power, wealth, and leadership (Diekman et al. Reference Diekman, Brown, Johnston and Clark2010). We first use an original survey of undergraduate social science majors to show that those students who have higher levels of agentic goals are more interested in attending law school than those with lower agentic goals.
Interest in law school is not the only thing influenced by agentic goals. They can also exert influence over the career choices people make throughout their lives, including the occupations individuals select, the kinds of work they do within those occupations, and their persistence in that work (Agut, Hernández Blasi, and Pinazo Reference Agut, Blasi and Pinazo2022; Henderson et al. Reference Henderson, Bloodhart, Adams, Barnes, Burt, Clinton, Godfrey, Pollack, Fischer and Hernandez2022). Agentic career goals can also influence whether someone is interested in career changes, like seeking political office. When people think about political careers, they characterize them as facilitating agentic goals (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Holman, Diekman and McAndrew2016; Conroy and Green Reference Conroy and Green2020; Fraile and Marinova Reference Fraile and Marinova2024). Because people are likely to pursue careers they believe will align with their broader goals, we argue that lawyers will see political ambition as consistent with their broader agentic goals. Those lawyers with higher levels of agentic career goals may display particularly high levels of political ambition. We use data from a three-panel survey of law school graduates (Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Garth, Sterling, Wilkins, Dawe and Michelson2023) to show that holding agentic career goals increases lawyers’ political ambition. These results hold even when we measure agentic goals in an earlier wave of the survey and with a wide set of controls.
Generally, women are underrepresented in political office, particularly among lawyers in politics (Bonica Reference Bonica2020). While the causes of women’s underrepresentation are widespread (ranging from voter stereotypes to difficulty accessing fundraising networks), one of the most reliable gaps is in political ambition and between men and women in their willingness to run for political office (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Holman, Diekman and McAndrew2016; Silva and Skulley Reference Silva and Skulley2019; Crowder-Meyer Reference Crowder-Meyer2020). These gender differences extend to law students; even though women have reliably made up half of law school students over the past decade or more, women in law school are less likely than their male counterparts to be interested in high-level clerkships (Badas and Stauffer Reference Badas and Stauffer2023) and women lawyers are less interested in judicial office (Williams Reference Williams2008).
One underlying source of the gender gap in political ambition rests in gendered socialization around career goals (Diekman et al. Reference Diekman, Clark, Johnston, Brown and Steinberg2011; Diekman and Steinberg Reference Diekman and Steinberg2013; Lay et al. Reference Lay, Holman, Bos, Greenlee, Oxley and Buffett2021). Gendered patterns in society encourage individuals to develop career goals that are consistent with their gender. Society teaches boys and men to value agentic skills and performance, including independence, leadership, and ambition (Eagly and Koenig Reference Eagly, Koenig, Dindia and Canary2006). Research has connected these gender roles to a wide set of career consequences (Diekman and Goodfriend Reference Diekman and Goodfriend2006; Diekman et al. Reference Diekman, Clark, Johnston, Brown and Steinberg2011; Folberg, Kercher, and Ryan Reference Folberg, Kercher and Ryan2020). Women’s reluctance to pursue a variety of careers, from STEM to business to politics, can be traced in part to their lower interest in agentic careers (Diekman, Joshi, and Benson-Greenwald Reference Diekman, Joshi, Benson-Greenwald and Gawronski2020). While women with legal backgrounds are a part of the eligibility pool and political pipeline (Barnes and Holman Reference Barnes and Holman2018; Bonica Reference Bonica2020; Thomsen and King Reference Thomsen and King2020; Bernhard and Holman Reference Bernhard and Holman2025), we find that women with law degrees are less politically ambitious than their male counterparts, even up to ten years after their graduation from law school.
Why? We argue that women in legal careers hold lower levels of agentic goals than their male counterparts. And because politics is seen as fulfilling agentic goals (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Holman, Diekman and McAndrew2016; Conroy and Green Reference Conroy and Green2020; Fraile and Marinova Reference Fraile and Marinova2024), politics thus helps fulfill men’s – but not women’s – career goals. We test this argument using our panel data, showing that women lawyers have lower levels of agentic career goals than their male counterparts, and these goals mediate the relationship between gender and political ambition. Subsequent tests show that this relationship persists while controlling for family arrangements, demographics, and satisfaction with work. Our results thus provide a key piece of understanding both why lawyers are more politically ambitious and why this ambition is concentrated among men with legal backgrounds.
Lawyers in political office
The legal profession is the most common pipeline for political office. In addition to holding judicial positions, lawyers hold an oversized share of seats in the U.S. Congress, across state legislatures, and in local office (Makse Reference Makse2019; Bonica Reference Bonica2020; Kirkland Reference Kirkland2022; Bowra and Makse Reference Bowra and Makse2023). We are far from the first scholars to turn our attention to the role of lawyers in political office. In his treatise on American democracy, de Tocqueville (1838, p. 260) described lawyers in America as “the only enlightened class whom the people do not mistrust,” noting that they “fill the legislative assemblies and are at the head of the administration; they consequently exercise a powerful influence upon the formation of the law and upon its execution.”
Why are lawyers so well-represented in political office? One school of thought, which Bonica (Reference Bonica2020) characterizes as a “supply” argument, contends that incentives in the legal profession align closely with holding political office. Legal training can be useful for understanding legislation, interpreting laws, and navigating the complexities of the legal system (Hain and Piereson Reference Hain and Piereson1975; Podmore Reference Podmore1977; Miller Reference Miller2002). Lawyers may be well situated to leverage their political experience into more lucrative positions after leaving office and thus may be more interested than people in other professions in running for office (Diermeier, Keane, and Merlo Reference Diermeier, Keane and Merlo2005; Egerod Reference Egerod2022). The networks that lawyers develop in law school and the legal profession are central to raising money (Bonica Reference Bonica2020; Reference Bonica2017).Footnote 2
We argue that Goal Congruity Theory (GCT) offers a new path to understanding the representation of lawyers in political office. Under the GCT framework (Diekman, Joshi, and Benson-Greenwald Reference Diekman, Joshi, Benson-Greenwald and Gawronski2020), individuals vary in their preferences about the characteristics of their careers and jobs. These preferences are rooted in childhood and adult socialization and are shaped by both internal interests and external rewards and punishments (Eagly and Wood Reference Eagly, Wood and Naples2016; Diekman, Joshi, and Benson-Greenwald Reference Diekman, Joshi, Benson-Greenwald and Gawronski2020). Individuals work to match their own goals with careers that are perceived to afford those goals. Subsequently, someone’s interest in a field is influenced by their perception that a career matches, or is congruent with, their goals (Diekman et al. Reference Diekman, Clark, Johnston, Brown and Steinberg2011). To our knowledge, however, work has yet to explore the long-term impacts of career goals on career choices much later in life.
While a variety of factors shape interest in a career, a common delineation is between agentic and communal foci (Folberg, Kercher, and Ryan Reference Folberg, Kercher and Ryan2020). Agentic goals are seen as self-focused, and individuals with these goals seek out occupations that allow them to lead, increase their social status, exert influence over others, or master knowledge (Diekman et al. Reference Diekman, Brown, Johnston and Clark2010). In comparison, communal goals are other-focused, including an interest in helping others, improving society, or working collaboratively. Different kinds of work are seen as fulfilling specific goals: for example, being a CEO or a scientist is seen as fulfilling agentic goals because the work involves leadership, decision-making, and a high social status, while being a preschool teacher or a nurse fulfills communal goals as the work is other focused and involves helping others, working collaboratively, and improving society (Diekman et al. Reference Diekman, Clark, Johnston, Brown and Steinberg2011). Because preferences for these goals vary across individuals in society, so do preferences for specific careers.
While scholars have not explicitly connected the pursuit of a law degree and legal careers to agentic career goals, a wide set of evidence suggests that agentic individuals further express interest in law school. People choose legal careers because of agentic reasons like status and wealth (Schleef Reference Schleef2000). Given their competitive nature and association with ambition, wealth, and leadership, high-skill careers like legal positions are linked to agentic abilities and traits. (Froehlich et al. Reference Froehlich, Maria, Dorrough and Martiny2020). The character and personality traits relating to agentic career goals, such as extraversion (Roberts and Robins Reference Roberts and Robins2000), are also associated with success in a legal career.Footnote 3 To our knowledge, scholars have not yet explicitly examined how agentic career goals shape interest in law school. We test this with our first hypothesis.
Hypothesis 1: Agenticism is positively associated with interest in law school.
Career goals and political ambition
Just as career goals shape who selects into law school, these same goals influence interest in career changes beyond training and education. One such consequence of agentic goals is that individuals with more agenticism may also have higher rates of interest in seeking political office (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Holman, Diekman and McAndrew2016; Conroy and Green Reference Conroy and Green2020; Fraile and Marinova Reference Fraile and Marinova2024). For example, one study of college students and college graduates found overwhelming agreement that politicians dedicate their time largely to pursuing agentic goals (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Holman, Diekman and McAndrew2016). Another study of the expressed reasons for running for office among those with some level of political ambition found that agentic goals helped explain the difference between individuals who ultimately became political candidates and those who opted out of running for political office (Conroy and Green Reference Conroy and Green2020). Interest in the agentic components of politics and a political career drives interest in engagement (Fraile and Marinova Reference Fraile and Marinova2024), even among political elites (Ohmura and Bailer Reference Ohmura and Bailer2023).
Other research on personality and interpersonal characteristics also connects agenticism to both legal careers and political ambition. Many lawyers select legal work that requires a higher level of engagement in competition and conflict (both agentic traits) than many people face in their careers, for example, advocating for clients or appearing in court. Those interested in conflict are also more politically ambitious (Kanthak and Woon Reference Kanthak and Woon2015; Preece and Stoddard Reference Preece and Stoddard2015). Lab experiments find that an interest in conflict and the competitive nature of politics are directly linked to political ambition (Kanthak and Woon Reference Kanthak and Woon2015; Preece and Stoddard Reference Preece and Stoddard2015). Agenticism is also associated with risk tolerance, a characteristic shared by lawyers (Perez Reference Perez2011) and those who engage in politics and run for political office (Maestas et al. Reference Maestas, Sarah Fulton and Stone2006; Sweet-Cushman Reference Sweet-Cushman2016; Friesen and Holman Reference Friesen and Holman2022). We thus expect that the same patterns will be evident among lawyers:
Hypothesis 2: Lawyers with higher levels of agentic career goals will have more political ambition.
Career goals explain gender gaps in political ambition
But not all groups of lawyers are well-represented in political office. One key group difference is that women lawyers are disproportionately underrepresented in elected office, both compared to their share of lawyers and within women in the legislature. Today, women make up about 38% of attorneys in the United States, a figure that has been relatively constant for several years. Despite near-equal levels of men and women in law school and women’s growing share of legal positions, this has not translated to women lawyers in political office. Women held 22% of seats in state legislatures from 1993 to 2022; 17% of state legislative seats were held by lawyers (Makse Reference Makse2019). Yet only 2% of state legislative seats are held by women attorneys. Similar patterns exist in the US Congress. Women account for 19% of members of Congress without law degrees between 1973 and 2014, but only 9% of members of Congress with law degrees (Bonica Reference Bonica2020). Women lawyers are also underrepresented among mayors, city council members, and as candidates for local office (Kirkland Reference Kirkland2022; Bernhard and Holman Reference Bernhard and Holman2025). Women have long been in the minority of both appointed and elected judicial positions, even as they may be advantaged in seeking those positions (Gill and Eugenis Reference Gill and Eugenis2019; Gunderson et al. Reference Gunderson, Kim, Lane, Bauer, Davis and Searles2024). While scholars have deeply investigated the ways that gender shapes the experiences of judicial candidates for office, the impact of women in judicial positions on case outcomes, and the ways that the legal system treats men and women in different ways (Songer and Crews-Meyer Reference Songer and Crews-Meyer2000; Collins and Moyer Reference Collins and Moyer2008; Williams Reference Williams2008; Gleason, Jones, and McBean Reference Gleason, Jones and McBean2019), we are not aware of work where scholars directly examine if men and women lawyers have differing levels of general political ambition, a necessary precursor to seeking and accessing political office.
Given that law school is the most common pipeline to political office, understanding why women lawyers are underrepresented among elected officials is central to explaining broader patterns of women’s underrepresentation in politics. Investigating whether and why women lawyers exhibit similar levels of political ambition to men can also offer important insights into the political pipeline. Earlier research on political pipelines has assumed that one reason women are underrepresented in office is because they are missing from key political pipelines. Our work instead suggests that the same careers that serve as pipelines to politics for men may be gendered in important ways such that even when women are present in traditional pipeline careers, they exhibit less political ambition than men.
Hypothesis 3: Women lawyers will have lower levels of political ambition than men lawyers.
We theorize that goal congruity theory not only helps explain high levels of political ambition among lawyers, but also explains why women lawyers are particularly underrepresented in political office. GCT emerges from a gendered perspective: Eagly and colleagues (Eagly, Wood, and Diekman Reference Eagly, Wood, Diekman, Eckes and Trautner2000; Eagly and Koenig Reference Eagly, Koenig, Dindia and Canary2006) articulate career goals as a means of understanding the consequences of the development of gender roles. Gendered patterns in society encourage individuals to develop roles and expectations based on their gender. Girls and women are socialized to value and perform activities associated with the private sphere; this means communal roles that involve developing interpersonal skills, caring for others, and working collaboratively. In comparison, society instructs boys and men to perform public roles: this means that men are more likely to value agentic skills and performance, including independence, leadership, and ambition.
Gender roles influence a wide set of career choices (Diekman and Steinberg Reference Diekman and Steinberg2013; Folberg, Kercher, and Ryan Reference Folberg, Kercher and Ryan2020). Indeed, women’s reluctance to pursue occupations from STEM to policing to politics can be traced in part to their lower interest in agentic careers (Diekman et al. Reference Diekman, Clark, Johnston, Brown and Steinberg2011; Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Holman, Diekman and McAndrew2016; Dinhof and Willems Reference Dinhof and Willems2024). These gendered patterns are then self-reinforcing: as there are more men in a job, it is seen as more agentic (Froehlich et al. Reference Froehlich, Maria, Dorrough and Martiny2020), which then makes that job less appealing to women who are interested in communal careers.
While we might expect that both men and women who go to law school and complete legal training are more agentic than their non-law-oriented peers, it may be that women within legal careers have or develop lower levels of agentic goals compared to their male counterparts. Research on men’s and women’s experiences in law school and legal careers repeatedly points to gendered experiences and decisions. Even as women have reached parity in law school enrollment, high levels of gender segregation in the types of law that men and women practice persist.Footnote 4 This segregation maps onto differences in agentic and communal goals: women are more likely to choose forms of law that focus on public service (i.e., government and nonprofit sectors) or those that are collaborative, whereas men select forms of law that focus on competition and conflict (i.e., criminal defense and big law) (Abel Reference Abel2001; Dau-Schmidt et al. Reference Dau-Schmidt, Galanter, Mukhopadhaya and Hull2009; Epstein and Winston Reference Epstein and Winston2009; Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Garth, Sterling, Wilkins, Dawe and Michelson2023). Women are more likely to express interest in public service careers when they enter law school (Schleef Reference Schleef2000; Abel Reference Abel2001; Carroll and Brayfield Reference Carroll and Brayfield2007; Epstein and Winston Reference Epstein and Winston2009), although that interest may decline over time (Guinier, Fine, and Balin Reference Guinier, Fine and Balin1994). Women lawyers, even those at big law firms, are more interested in pro bono work (Granfield and Mather Reference Granfield and Mather2009). If men lawyers are more agentic than women, and agenticism is associated with political ambition, then we expect that this helps explain the gap in ambition between men and women with legal backgrounds.
Hypothesis 4: Agenticism mediates the relationship between gender and political ambition.
Individuals may also be motivated by communal goals when choosing law school. Some jobs in the legal field (such as working for the government or nonprofit organizations) and some specializations (including family law, public defense, and human rights law) focus on helping people. Individuals who prioritize communal values may be likely to select law school and specialize in an area that allows them to fulfill communal goals. It is likewise possible that individuals who are motivated to help people see elected office as a promising avenue for accomplishing this goal. We also know from previous work on gender and career goals that women are both more likely to have communal goals and select careers they believe will help them fulfill those communal goals (Diekman et al. Reference Diekman, Brown, Johnston and Clark2010). We focus here on agentic goals as previous work has consistently found that agentic (versus communal) goals are associated with political ambition (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Holman, Diekman and McAndrew2016; Conroy and Green Reference Conroy and Green2020). Indeed, even as individuals might be motivated by communal goals to express some interest in running for office, Conroy and Green (Reference Conroy and Green2020) find that agentic goals are more likely to move someone from being interested in running for office to actually running for office.
In Figure 1, we present the theoretical overview of our argument. We start with gender role socialization, where society trains boys and girls and men and women into particular gender roles. These roles have a wide variety of consequences, including that men are more likely to develop agentic goals and motivations, including seeking wealth, influence, and prestige (pathway A). In comparison, women are more likely to develop communal goals and motivations like helping others and identifying work that will feel valuable and change society for the better (pathway B). These goals then influence the careers and training that individuals pursue, such that those with agentic goals seek out agentic careers like being a lawyer, a scientist, or a police officer (pathway C), while those with communal goals pursue careers with communal characteristics like being a teacher, a social worker, or a personal assistant (pathway D). Because of the association between agenticism and political office, agentic goals and agentic careers provide a positive pathway into political ambition, while communal goals and careers are less likely to provide such a pathway.
Figure 1. Goal Congruity Framework, Career Goals, and Political Ambition.
Research design: evidence from surveys
To test our hypotheses, we turn to survey data from two sources: an original survey of undergraduate social science (USS) majors at a large state school in the Midwest and the After the JD (AJD) study, the most expansive and ambitious survey of law graduates and their career trajectories in the contemporary United States. It features a longitudinal sample of lawyers in the ten years following their graduation from law school.
Study 1: Undergraduate social science (USS) survey
In the spring of 2024, we fielded a survey to 374 undergraduates at a large state school in the Midwest.Footnote 5 We recruited students from political science courses to complete the survey in exchange for extra credit; this pool is largely social science majors.
We focus specifically on social science majors because this is the most common pipeline into law school.Footnote 6 Our sample draws from those students who were taking political science classes at a large public university in the United States. This is not a random set of undergraduate students, and the interest in political science of this group of students limits our ability to draw wide conclusions about the interests of students more generally; political science majors are more interested in politics than other majors and are more likely to attend law school. While scholars have not (to our knowledge) examined the degree to which agentic goals shape undergraduate major choices generally, we do know that agentic goals generally shape interest in STEM careers in college, suggesting that those with more agentic career goals may be more interested in the social sciences. In some ways, these characteristics of the sample make our job easier; for example, there are enough people interested in law school to examine variation among those interested in law school.
In our sample, 58% of the respondents identified as women, 40% identified as men, one percent as non-binary, and one percent preferred not to say. Ten percent of the respondents identified as Hispanic, and 9% identified as Black. The median respondent was 19 (the average age was 20), and the respondents’ ages ranged from 17 to 54. We used this survey to assess our first hypothesis: higher levels of agenticism predict interest in law school. We benchmark this against published surveys of a broader sample of undergraduate students and find similar levels of ambition (see Appendix Table A2).
To assess interest in law, we asked students, “Do you plan to go to law school after you graduate?” They could choose one of four responses: Yes, I definitely will go to law school; I’m considering going to law school; I might consider law school sometime in the future; No, I definitely will not want to go to law school. We code these so that higher values indicate more interest. In our sample, about 53.8% of students said they definitely would not go to law school; 13.0% said they might consider it, 15.3% were seriously considering it, and 17.9% were definitely planning to attend. Thus, even in our sample of social science students – i.e., a sample of students that are most likely to go to law school (as we show in Appendix Table A3, the majority of lawyers in our AJD sample are social science majors) – the majority of students indicate with certainty they will not attend law school.
As a measurement of interest in agentic activities in a career, we use a set of questions about career goals. First, we asked respondents to tell us about a career they would like to have in the future. We then followed with, “Thinking about that career, how important is each of these for your future career?” Respondents were provided the full scale from Diekman and colleagues (Reference Diekman, Clark, Johnston, Brown and Steinberg2011), with responses ranging from serving the community to power. We create an additive scale using 13 items in the agentic subscale: competition, individualism, intellectual challenges, independence, control over the work you do, income, self-direction, financial reward, status, achievement, recognition, power, and security. These items hang together well on a single scale (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.85).Footnote 7
We control for a variety of factors that might shape agenticism and political ambition, including gender (when applicable), race, household income, and whether the respondent had or planned on having children.
Study 2: AJD Panel Survey of Lawyers
Our central set of data is drawn from the AJD three-wave survey, conducted in 2000, 2007, and 2012. This survey, funded by the American Bar Association and the National Science Foundation, surveyed more than 5000 newly graduated lawyers across a decade. The panel design allows us to examine the long-term effects of career goals on political ambition and establish clear relationships between views of a legal career and interest in politics. The panel survey was carefully designed to provide the views of a representative set of lawyers’ careers. As such, the sample contains lawyers who graduated from elite institutions (11%) to lawyers who attended fourth-tier law schools (13%). The sample is 52% women and 70% white. More than three-quarters of the sample (82%) are married, and 68% have children by the third wave of the survey.Footnote 8
We assess political ambition among lawyers using a single question: “How important are each of the following long-term goals to you? Becoming a politician.” Respondents were given five response options (Not important at all (1) to Extremely important (5)), with a mean response of 1.48. Ambition is measured in Wave 3.
To measure agentic career goals, we create an additive scale of three questions using data from Wave 2. Respondents were asked, “How important are each of the following long-term goals to you?” and provided a wide set of responses. We focus on three of these responses: intellectual challenge, accumulating great wealth, and becoming an influential person. These items hang together well into a single scale (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.82). We create an additive scale that ranges from 0 to 1, with a mean value of .79. We repeat the process for Wave 3 and create an additive scale that ranges from 0 to 1, with a mean value of 0.59.Footnote 9 We expect that measuring agentic goals in Wave 2 provides a hard test for this expected relationship; individuals can change their priorities and goals over time and if we find a relationship between agentic goals in Wave 2 and ambition in Wave 3, this will indicate the power of these goals in shaping career decisions in the long run.
Figure 2 plots the mean and distribution of layers of career goals for each of the agentic goals in the top three panels (from Wave 2) and the mean and distribution from the scale for both Wave 2 and Wave 3 in the bottom panels. It is clear from this figure that even though lawyers, on average, score very high on the agentic scale, there is substantial variation. The majority of lawyers say they want a career with intellectual challenges, as well as a desire to accumulate wealth. Fewer lawyers, however, state they care about being an influential person. When the goals are scaled together, the 95% confidence intervals range from a low of 0.27 to a high of 1 in Wave 2 and from 0.12 to 1 in Wave 3. We argue that this variation is key to explaining which lawyers are more or less likely to run for political office.
Figure 2. Lawyers Express High Levels of Agentic Career Goals. Note: After the JD, Waves 2 and 3. Values rescaled from 0 to 1.
We control for a variety of factors that might shape agenticism and political ambition, including age, white race, law school rank, and whether the respondent was married or had any children. Gender and race are measured in Wave 1 (but are entirely stable across the waves). Age, law school rank, marriage, and children are measured in Wave 3.
Evidence of the role of agentic career goals
Agentic career goals and interest in law school
We start by evaluating our first hypothesis: that agenticism is positively associated with interest in law school by drawing on data from the USS survey. We first look at the distribution of the agentic goals scale by interest in law school. We create an additive scale of the 13 agentic items on our survey. The scale ranges from 0 to 1, with a mean value of 0.60. These items hang together well into a single scale (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.85). Figure 3 plots the mean and distribution of agentic goals for individuals who are not interested in going to law school (right pane) and for those who are interested in law school (right pane).Footnote 10 The figure provides two key pieces of information: the average level of agenticism is higher for individuals who say they plan to go to law school (0.64) than for individuals who do not (0.60) plan to go to law school (p < 0.05) and the distribution is much tighter for individuals who want to go to law school than those who do not. In other words, while not all students exhibiting high agenticism levels aspire to attend law school, the majority of those who want to attend law school have high agentic levels.
Figure 3. Undergraduate Social Science Majors Interested in Law School Have Higher Rates of Agentic Career Goals. Note: Data from USS Survey. Agentic goals include an average of 13 items, rescaled from 0 to 1.
Do these differences persist when we introduce control variables and consider the four-part assessment of our measure of interest in law school? Table 1 reports the results for an ordered logit analysis using the agentic scale, where the outcome variable ranges from 1 (No, I definitely do not want to go to law school) to 4 (Yes, I definitely will go to law school). Undergraduate social science majors who are higher on the agenticism scale are more likely to say they have plans to go to law school, even with controls for household income, race, gender, and whether they plan to have children; these results provide support for our first hypothesis.
Table 1. Undergraduate Social Science Majors With Higher Agentic Goals Plan to Go to Law School
Notes: USS Survey Data. Ordinary least squares regression; standard errors in parentheses.
*p < 0.05, Controls include plans for children, household income, Hispanic, Black, and gender. See Appendix Table D1 for full results.
We assess the sensitivity of our results to the agenticism scale. We find a similar pattern when we break the items into separate factors for influence, wealth, and prestige, with prestige being the strongest predictor of interest in law school (see Appendix Tables D2–4).Footnote 11 We also observe consistent results when we replicate the results using the three-item from the USS Survey data that most closely approximate the questions from the measure of the AJD study (instead of the full agentic scale). Specifically, we used three questions that asked students how important power, status, and financial reward are for their future careers (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.66). As before, we create an additive scale that ranges from 0 to 1, with a mean value of 0.59. Consistent with the results presented in Table 1, the relationship between the curtailed agentic career goals index and students’ plans to go to law school is positive and significant (see Appendix Table D6). We also consider whether other characteristics may confound this relationship in the form of omitted variable bias. Research finds that conflict aversion is negatively associated with political ambition and agentic goals (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Holman, Diekman and McAndrew2016). But we continue to find that agenticism predicts interest in law school, even when we control for conflict aversion (see Appendix Table D1, Model III).
Next, we plot these results to better understand the substantive effect of agentic traits on students’ interest in going to law school. Figure 4 plots the expected level of our dependent variable (plans to attend law school) on the y-axis across the range of the agentic traits scale on the x-axis. It is clear from the figure that the relationship is positive and significant: Our model predicts a move from 0 (the minimum value) to a 1 (maximum value) increases the likelihood that an individual wants to go to law school from 1.59 to 2.26; a difference of 0.67 (p < 0.05). But the effects are not just explained by differences in the tails of the data. Even a smaller move from one standard deviation below the mean (0.41) to one standard deviation above the mean (0.80) results in a significant difference in plans to attend law school – an increase from 1.86 to 2.12 (a difference of 0.26; p < 0.05). To put these findings in context, recall the majority of students in our sample (53.7%) say they definitely do not want to go to law school.
Figure 4. Agenticism and Plans to Attend Law School. Note: Expected values presented in Figure 4 are calculated based on the results in Appendix Table D1, Model III (the most conservative estimates).
Agentic career goals and political ambition
Next, we assess whether agenticism is associated with political ambition. Recall that we anticipate higher levels of political ambition from lawyers with agentic professional aspirations. To evaluate our second hypothesis, we regress the endorsement of agentic goals onto political ambition among the panel of lawyers from the AJD study. Consistent with the data from our USS survey, we observe that lawyers tend to be high on the agentic scale. On a scale from 0 to 1, lawyers have an average of 0.79 agentic goals.Footnote 12
Are those high on agenticism more likely to want to become politicians? We start with examining the bivariate relationship between agentic career goals and ambition, presented in Figure 5. As the figure shows, the average level of agenticism increases across our ambition scale, but there is also quite a bit of variation. That is, on average, individuals with higher levels of agenticism also have more interest in political office, but there are still those with high agentic goals without political ambition and those with political ambition who have lower levels of agentic goals.
Figure 5. Those With Higher Levels of Agentic Goals Are More Likely to Express Political Ambition. Note: Data from the After the JD; agenticism scale ranges from 0 to 1 and is constructed from three items.
To fully examine the relationship between agenticism and political ambition, we estimate models using the agentic goals scale in Waves 2 and 3 of the panel data and political ambition in Wave 3 with a full set of controls. Model I of Table 2 presents the result for this analysis using agentic career goals in Wave 2, Model II measures agentic goals in Wave 3. We again find that agenticism predicts political ambition, even when measured across time and with controls for age, race, the rank of their law school, whether they are married or partnered, and whether they have any children. We also find consistency in the substantive effects across time, with a movement from two standard deviations below the mean on agentic goals in Wave 3 to two standard deviations above the mean, resulting in a full point change in our dependent variable, which is a five-point measure. It is perhaps not surprising that the results are consistent using agentic goals from Wave 2 or Wave 3, as these values are highly correlated (see Appendix Figure B2).
Table 2. Lawyers With Higher Agentic Goals Express More Political Ambition
Notes: After the JD Data. Ordinary least squares regression; standard errors in parentheses.
*p < 0.05. Controls include age, white, married, any children, and law school rank. Survey weights applied. See Appendix Table D7 for full results.
Gender, agenticism, and political ambition
Up until this point, we have shown support for our expectations that agenticism is associated with a stronger desire to go to law school and an increased interest in running for political office. The next step in our analysis is to evaluate why it is that women lawyers have lower levels of political ambition. We start by showing that men in our survey express higher levels of political ambition than women (Table 3, Model I). Men express higher levels of political ambition than women, even with controls for background characteristics that are associated with political ambition like children, race, and age.
Table 3. Women Lawyers Have Lower Ambition, Agentic Goals
Notes: After the JD Data. Ordinary least squares regression. Standard errors in parentheses.
*p < 0.05. Controls include age, white, married, any children, and law school rank. Survey weights applied. Agentic career goals measured in Wave 2, political ambition measured in Wave 3. See Appendix Table D8 for full results.
Next, given that agentic goals predict political ambition, we assess whether women lawyers have lower levels of agenticism than men (Table 3, Models II and III). Overall, men hold higher levels of agentic career goals than women, but the magnitude of this relationship is not large (0.03 on a zero-to-one scale). Given the correspondence between legal careers and agentic career goals, and those interested in law school are higher on agentic scales, the difference between men and women is noteworthy: women have essentially already selected into an agentic career; a visual display of the small differences in agenticism between men and women is presented in the appendix in Figure B1. We replicate these findings in two other ways: In a parallel dataset of Michigan Law School Alumni, men hold higher levels of agentic career goals than women (University of Michigan Law School 2024).Footnote 13 This scale is constructed from slightly different indicators, but the magnitude of the finding is similar (Appendix Table D10). We also examine these relationships using change in agentic goals over time and continue to see that women express lower levels of agentic goals and political ambition (Appendix Table D13).
But do these differences in agenticism between men and women matter for political ambition? Recall that we expect agentic goals to help explain the relationship between gender and political ambition among lawyers. To assess this relationship, Table 4, Models I and II show that gender and agentic career goals (measured in either Wave 2 or Wave 3) both independently predict political ambition; however, the coefficient size of gender decreases when we account for agenticism, indicating a mediated relationship (Baron and Kenny Reference Baron and Kenny1986). In Models III and IV of Table 4, we examine this relationship further by including an interaction between men and agenticism regressed onto political ambition. Here we find that gender no longer significantly predicts political ambition in either model. But agenticism alone, and the interaction between gender and agenticism, are significant and positive in both models, showing that agenticism and gender, in combination, help us understand political ambition.
Table 4. Agenticism and Gender Interact to Predict Political Ambition
Notes: After the JD Data. The dependent variable is political ambition. Ordinary least squares regression. Standard errors in parentheses.
p < 0.05. Controls include age, white, married, any children, and law school rank. Survey weights applied. See Appendix Table 8 for full results.
To facilitate the interpretation of this relationship, we plot the expected level of political ambition for men and women across the range of agentic goals in Figures 6 and 7. Consistent with our previous finding, we observe that agenticism is positively and significantly associated with political ambition for both men and women, whether we measure it in Wave 2 (Figure 4) or Wave 3 (Figure 5). We find no gender gap in political ambition between men and women with low levels of political ambition, whether we measure agenticism in Wave 2 or Wave 3.
Figure 6. Agenticism (Wave 2) and Gender Interact to Predict Political Ambition. Note: Figure produced post-hoc from results presented in Table 4, column III.
Figure 7. Agenticism (Wave 3) and Gender Interact to Predict Political Ambition. Note: Figure produced post-hoc from results presented in Table 4, column IV.
Among individuals who hold higher levels of agentic goals, however, the gap between men and women emerges and increases such that agenticism is a stronger predictor of men’s political ambition than women’s ambition. In short, women lawyers are less ambitious than men because women’s agenticism is generally lower than men’s and because agenticism is not as strong a predictor for women’s political ambition as it is for men’s ambition, particularly among those women with higher levels of agenticism. We find these relationships when we examine agenticism as measured earlier in life (Figure 4) and at the same time as political ambition (Figure 5), and despite women both being in the pipeline and more agentic than women who do not select into law school.
Assessing alternative explanations: politics as an off-ramp
Scholars for more than a century have pointed to lawyers’ dissatisfaction with their jobs and the level of satisfaction they feel with their work (Brandeis Reference Brandeis1905; Rhode Reference Rhode2003; Kelly Reference Kelly2009). Those evaluating lawyers and political careers (i.e., Hain and Piereson Reference Hain and Piereson1975; Miller Reference Miller2002; Scheingold and Sarat Reference Scheingold and Sarat2004) suggest that seeking political office might be an opportunity for an ambitious individual who is dissatisfied with their current career to obtain power and prestige. Individuals with high levels of agenticism are less likely to be satisfied with their career and more likely to be politically ambitious. In other words, politics may be an “off-ramp” for people who are dissatisfied with their current job, particularly the agentic aspects of that job. However, individuals who are satisfied with the challenges and influence presented in their current line of work may be less likely to look toward politics. Therefore, it is possible that people with agentic goals are not more ambitious; rather, they may be dissatisfied with their work and seek out alternative mechanisms to pursue their goals.
To assess this relationship, we use a measure that allows us to assess how satisfied people are with the ability to fulfill agentic goals in their current career. Specifically, the AJD asks respondents: “How satisfied are you with each of the following aspects of your current position?” Responses included such items as “Prospects for advancement,” “Salary,” and “Opportunity to grow practice”; a full list of items is available in Appendix Table 2. Workplace satisfaction is measured in slightly different ways in Waves 2 and 3; we provide estimates of the effect of both, as it is unclear whether satisfaction in the past or present would shape political ambition. We create an index of satisfaction for both waves and regress this to the political ambition in Wave 3.
If political careers are seen as an “off-ramp” for individuals who are unhappy with the agentic opportunities in their current career, then we should find a negative relationship between agentic satisfaction and political ambition. But we do not. As we show in Table 4, we do not see a statistically significant relationship between satisfaction and political ambition. Individuals who are satisfied with their careers are no more or less likely to express political ambition.
It is possible, however, that the insignificant relationship between satisfaction and ambition disguises a heterogeneous relationship by gender. Women may have lower expectations about the agentic nature of their work (Chiu Reference Chiu1998). The job sorting that occurs between men and women in their careers may also lead to differences in job satisfaction. Lawyers who work for nonprofits or the government are generally more satisfied with their work, and women are more likely to hold those positions (Granfield and Mather Reference Granfield and Mather2009; Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Garth, Sterling, Wilkins, Dawe and Michelson2023).
We thus examine the effect of agentic work satisfaction interacted for men and women, presenting the results in Table 5, Model III, and Figure 8. Although women have a baseline lower level of career satisfaction and political ambition than men, they are no more or less likely to express interest in pursuing a political career when they are (dis)satisfied with their current career. In other words, we find no evidence that politics is an off-ramp for individuals who are dissatisfied with their ability to achieve agentic goals at work, nor do we find that men and women have varying levels of satisfaction as a mechanism to understand women’s lower political ambition.
Table 5. Satisfaction With Agentic Components of Career Does Not Predict Political Ambition
Notes: Ordinary least squares regression. Standard errors in parentheses.
*p < 0.05. Controls include age, white, law school rank, married, any children, and agentic career goals. Survey weights applied. See Appendix Table 9 for full results.
Figure 8. Satisfaction With Career Does Not Influence Political Ambition for Men or Women. Note: Figure produced post-hoc from results provided in Table 4, Model III.
Conclusion
Why are there so many men with legal backgrounds holding positions of power in our political system? In this article, we propose a new path to understanding ambition for law school and political ambition as two components of a broad set of career goals that individuals pursue throughout their professional lives. To demonstrate this, we observe that undergraduate social science majors interested in going to law school and lawyers alike are high on agenticism. We further connect this to theories of gender role congruity and expand on how gender roles influence the composition of political leaders (Schneider and Bos Reference Schneider and Bos2019). Using data from the AJD study, we show that women, even those with legal degrees, hold lower levels of agentic career goals than men, and this gap in career goals is associated with less interest in seeking political office.
Our research has important implications for understanding many facets of legal careers. Political office is far from the only outcome where gender gaps appear for women with legal backgrounds: women, even those from elite schools, are less likely to seek and be awarded partner status in law firms (Kay and Gorman Reference Kay and Gorman2008; Rhode Reference Rhode2013; Sterling and Reichman Reference Sterling and Reichman2016). Within a decade of graduating from law school, women bill fewer hours than their male counterparts (Azmat and Ferrer Reference Azmat and Ferrer2017) and are less likely to become partners (Dinovitzer, Reichman, and Sterling Reference Dinovitzer, Reichman and Sterling2009), with a persistent gap in earnings between men and women (Dau-Schmidt et al. Reference Dau-Schmidt, Galanter, Mukhopadhaya and Hull2009; Wilkins, Fong, and Dinovitzer Reference Wilkins, Fong and Dinovitzer2015). These disparities extend to other legal-oriented work that also requires ambition: women are less likely to be clerks for the highest courts and publish notes at lower rates (Kaye and Gastwirth Reference Kaye and Gastwirth2008; Mullins and Leong Reference Mullins and Leong2011). Within legal systems, women are treated differently by judges and court systems (Gleason, Jones, and McBean Reference Gleason, Jones and McBean2019; Gleason Reference Gleason2020). Research shows that institutional and gender biases explain some components of these gaps, but the direct effect of gender remains. Future work might consider the ways that agentic career goals would help us understand gender differences in experiences in the legal world: women may be both less interested in agentic components of specific careers and punished for their agentic behavior when they engage in actions such as wealth-seeking and status improvement, paralleling work on gender and political candidacies (Schneider and Bos Reference Schneider and Bos2019; Bauer Reference Bauer2020).
Our work also has ramifications for other forms of gender segregation within the legal academy. Agentic goals may help us understand choices made by students in law school about clinic work and summer clerkships as well as lawyers’ selection into the private or public sector and specialties (Sterling and Reichman Reference Sterling and Reichman2016; Badas and Stauffer Reference Badas and Stauffer2023). Given the impact these choices have on lawyers’ careers and the gender segregation patterns, future research might seek to understand how career goals shift throughout people’s careers and to unpack how the socialization process in law school reinforces or redirects women’s and men’s career goals. In particular, it would be useful to understand if gender differences in career goals emerge during law school owing to gendered experiences, or if women and men enter into law school with fundamentally different goals and those goals persist over time. Our findings that the effects of agentic goals are relatively consistent from Wave 2 to Wave 3 of the AJD data suggest that these values may form early on and remain consistent across time.
We focus on lawyers because they provide such a well-documented path to political office (Bonica Reference Bonica2020), but we would expect these findings to apply to any other profession where people opt into the career because of agentic goals and because the career is a pathway to office. For example, future research might apply these findings to those who have gotten graduate degrees in business and their interest in political office. As an interesting alternative, scholars might consider whether graduate degrees in education or medicine, which draw on a group with more communal goals, might have different effects on men’s and women’s entry into the candidate pool.Footnote 14 Although a variety of jobs serve as a pipeline to political office, women from communal occupations are systematically underrepresented in political office, according to these and related trends (Barnes, Beall, and Holman Reference Barnes, Beall and Holman2021; Kirkland Reference Kirkland2022).
Given that lawyers make up such a large share of political office holders, changing the composition of this pipeline could go far in remedying gender gaps in political office (Thomsen and King Reference Thomsen and King2020). Research on gender and political ambition finds that women are more likely to seek (and voters are more likely to elect women to) political offices that are seen as less agentic, for example, school board over mayors (Holman Reference Holman2017; Anzia and Bernhard Reference Anzia and Bernhard2022). By the same token, scholars might consider how factors that vary significantly across states and over time (e.g., the supply of women lawyers and institutional features such as legislative professionalism and term limits) influence the pipeline of women candidates into political office. Indeed, there is substantial variation in the share of women lawyers in state legislatures: On the one extreme, one in ten state legislative sessions between 1993 and 2021 had zero women lawyers serving. But in other states during that same period, at least 20% of women legislators were attorneys (Makse Reference Makse2019). Future work should examine variations in the structures that may facilitate or discourage women attorneys from seeking office in different institutional or political contexts.
Further, while work points to the importance of gender in judicial elections (Badas and Stauffer Reference Badas and Stauffer2019; Reference Badas and Stauffer2018; Gill and Eugenis Reference Gill and Eugenis2019; Gunderson et al. Reference Gunderson, Kim, Lane, Bauer, Davis and Searles2024), the ways that gender roles and career goals might shape women’s interest in and voter support for women in specific kinds of judicial positions (such as family court versus bankruptcy courts (Jacoby Reference Jacoby2024), for example) remains an open question. Our research also suggests that one way to increase women lawyers’ interest in holding political office may be to reframe politics for lawyers as a place to make policy changes and help others (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Holman, Diekman and McAndrew2016; Fraile and Marinova Reference Fraile and Marinova2024). If people see politics as a place for attaining power and influence, even women in the primary pipelines to political office may be less likely than men to pursue office.
Future research should examine the extent to which women who pursue both law school and politics are motivated by agentic versus communal goals. As we explained above, even in the current system, there are some communal motivations to pursue each of these pathways. Certain political offices (such as school board or secretary of education; see Bernhard and Holman Reference Bernhard and Holman2025) are seen as more communal and thus may be more interesting to those with communal goals themselves. Nonetheless, the results from our work suggest that even if communal-oriented individuals see law and politics as an avenue for fulfilling communal career goals. If they eschew the agentic aspects of these careers, it may discourage their entry. Thus, in addition to framing politics as a career for helping people, stakeholders interested in recruiting more women candidates should also consider how they can minimize the agentic aspects of these careers that may turn women away from politics.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at http://doi.org/10.1017/jlc.2025.10009.
Data availability statement
Data and replication materials available from the Law and Courts Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/H57QC6.
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