“For me that’s why that statistic says something about there being a real problem,” said Duchesneau. “Somehow the Law Review gets a lot of the prestige that these other journals don’t carry.”

The gender gap at the Law Review is nothing new.

“When I was a student here from 1994 to 1997, I took the Law Review competition in the spring of 95, and of the 40 to 42 people who made the Law Review that year, only nine of us were women,” said visiting professor Laura A. Rosenbury ’92 in a video released by Shatter the Ceiling, a new coalition to address gender disparities. “I assumed when I came back to the faculty this year, that the Law Review would be close to 50/50. And it’s not.”

Students and faculty said there is no clear answer as to why certain extracurricular activities end up disproportionately male. The Harvard Law Review this year implemented a new gender-based affirmative action policy in an attempt to counteract the gap.

“There is, for lack of better terms, a hierarchy in terms of extracurriculars on campus,” said third-year Harvard Law student Stephanie E. Davidson, outgoing president of the Women’s Law Association.

TROUBLE AT THE TOP

And while the problem might start with student activities, it extends into the job market. Many in the Law School consider certain activities like the Law Review and Ames Moot Court to be important lines on the resume when securing top jobs after graduation.

Female graduates at the Law School find positions at private law firms less often than their male peers, according to Assistant Dean for Career Services Mark A. Weber. At the same time, he said, women tend to enter public interest work in greater numbers than men.

Nationwide, women make up 19.9 percent of partners in private legal firms, according to the American Bar Association.

Visiting professor Daniel R. Coquillette said that part of this disparity can be attributed to the fact that large law firms have “never made the accommodations they should make to family life.”

“I was an associate in a big law firm and I’ll tell you, it really is a very, very tough existence,” he said. “You might say that they treat men and women equally. And that’s true, they make it difficult for everyone, but under the conditions of modern society, it impacts women more.”

Wilkins agreed that typical legal careers, particularly at law firms where the key years in which lawyers become partners coincide with the time when many choose to start a family, are “not just made for a man but made for a man whose wife doesn’t work.”

“In a profession in which human capital is at its core, we are systematically losing out on the talent of very talented female lawyers who are leaving the profession altogether sometimes,” he said.

Wilkins helped co-author a study entitled “After the JD,” in which researchers surveyed lawyers in 2008 who had entered private practice in 2000. They found that at large law firms of 250 or more, men were five times more likely to have been made equity partner than women.

Weber said that while the statistics at the level of the top positions might paint a troubling picture, firms who hire HLS graduates soon after graduation treat candidates equally regardless of gender.