Law was the second highest-rising subject this year
In the UK, the number of female students who took law as an A-level subject just about doubled that of male students this year, reported the Law Society Gazette.
Of the 16,526 students who pursued law, around 10,737 were girls while 5,789 were boys according to the Joint Council for Qualifications. The Gazette noted that this trend paralleled the shifting trend in the UK legal profession; women currently make up over half of solicitors in law firms (63 percent), according to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Moreover, the total number of law A-level entries this year marked a significant uptick from the previous year, which recorded just 14,973 entries. Cambridge OCR’s June provisional analysis revealed that law was the second highest-rising A-level subject, with entries soaring by over 11 percent this year. It falls behind only political studies.
Four-point-eight percent of students who sat law A-level this year obtained an A* grade, while 17 percent got an A grade or better and 40 percent recorded at least a B grade. According to the Gazette, these are similar numbers to last year.
These findings could be informed by the fact that female students taking A-levels outnumber male overall. Female students are also less likely than their male peers to pursue certain STEM subjects, the Gazette reported.
Moreover, law is perceived as a people-focused subject and is said to appeal more to girls, the Gazette theorized.
This year, there were overall 845,485 A-level entries recorded – an uptick of 2.9 percent compared to last year. This could in part be due to the 18-year-old population in the UK rising by 4.3 percent.
In 2024, the American Bar Association predicted that within 20 years, men in law may no longer outnumber women in the US. However, a UK study conducted that same year revealed that just 24 percent of women believed in equal professional access to the legal profession.
A statistics report released by the UK Bar Standards Board last year also found that Black students were “slightly less likely” to pass the barristers’ training course, with 45 percent passing compared to 52.7 percent of students from Asian descent, 69.2 percent of mixed-heritage students, and 66.7 percent of White students.
