I. INTRODUCTION Despite the progress women have made in the legal profession, (1) sex discrimination remains a substantial impediment to female advancement in this field. (2) Based on the findings of gender schema theory, one of the principal causes of this discrimination is the necessary role of stereotypes in normal cognitive processing. (3) To efficiently process information presented by their environments, people form cognitive knowledge structures called "schemas" that automatically categorize all related groups of information, including different groups of people. (4) The content of schemas is formed entirely from personal observation and experience, and once these structures are developed, all new information is processed according to its relation to schematic content. (5) Consequently, because gender stereotypes are still a prevalent, yet often implicit, component of most social environments, the resulting gender dichotomies become heavily integrated into general cognitive processing and thereby influence personal evaluations and perceptions of both others and ourselves. (6) One of the more predominant forms of these stereotypes is gender role stereotypes, which are also a primary mechanism for reinforcing sex discrimination towards women in the legal profession due to their basis in the social roles traditionally occupied by women and men. (7)
