Law School Insights: Analysing gender parity and reservations in 14 CLAT law schools

The Law School Insights is a series of columns focusing on the national law universities established across the India. This edition of the LSI focuses on gender parity within the student body of these law schools as well as the gender parity in between the general and reserved categories.

Last year, we published a brief, gender-based analysis of the students who wrote the Common Law Admission Test. The idea behind the piece was to see whether the newer national law schools would be making a difference to the legal profession in India, a field that has traditionally remained male-dominated. The results were surprising in the sense that nearly half of those admitted via the CLAT were women.

This year, we have focused on the student body admitted to these fifteen national law schools. And unlike last year, this piece also analyses the composition of those students admitted via a reserved category. We have looked at students admitted to 14 national law universities, and a total of 1,498 seats on offer.

Highlights

–       Out of the 14 toppers (one for each law school), only 4 were male

–       NUALS, Kochi had exactly equal number of male and female students

–       NLIU, NLU Jodhpur and CNLU admitted more female students than male

If you look at the tables below, the seats are almost equally divided between the male and female applicants with some variances. This year, both NLSIU and NALSAR have a far higher number of male students than female, marking a departure from last year.