When Beth McCann first worked as a trial prosecutor in Denver nearly 50 years ago, she was the only woman in the office doing the job.
One judge insisted on calling her “honey.” And another didn’t know what to call her.
“He asks me, ‘Is it Mrs. or Miss?’ And I said, ‘It’s Ms.,'” McCann said, and laughed. “I don’t think he ever called me anything from then on, just ‘The People.'”
As Denver’s elected district attorney, McCann now leads an office that has more women attorneys than men. The office’s gender ratio flipped to a female majority in 2019, two years after McCann took office, and there have been more women prosecutors than men every year since, a trend also seen in at least three other Front Range district attorney’s offices.
There are more women working as prosecutors than men in the First, 17th and 18th judicial districts, covering Adams, Arapahoe, Douglas, Broomfield and Jefferson counties.
It’s a shift that reflects the growing number of women lawyers across Colorado, according to records kept by the state’s Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel. The percentage of active attorneys who are women in Colorado rose from about 36% of all active attorneys in 2014 to 41% in 2022.
During that same timeframe, the share of active male attorneys declined from 64% to 59%, according to the agency’s annual reports.
It’s not that fewer men are becoming attorneys — the number of active male attorneys has stayed steady at about 16,000 for the last nine years — but rather that more women are entering the profession. There were 9,300 active female attorneys in Colorado in 2014, compared to 11,600 in 2022, according to the reports.
Nationally, about 38% of attorneys were women in 2022, up from 33% in 2012, according to the American Bar Association.
In the Denver DA’s office, there were 58 male prosecutors and 60 female prosecutors in 2023, according to numbers provided by the office. In the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, there were 56 women prosecutors and 38 men, spokesman Chris Hopper said. In the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office, women outnumber men by about 20, spokeswoman Brionna Boatright said. And in the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, the prosecutorial staff is 54% female, spokesman Eric Ross said.
In Denver, McCann credits a culture that recognizes the importance of life outside of work, noting that prosecutors of both genders can and do leave early to make it to a child’s after-school activities or special events.
“This is a very demanding job,” she said. “You have to work hard, you have to spend nights and weekends getting ready for trials, but we try to be as flexible as we can, so that we keep women.”
New parents can each take four weeks of paid parental leave, she said, and noted that mothers and fathers routinely do take that time, when in past decades men never took paternity leave and women were frowned on for taking maternity leave.
“I remember the men partners in my firm resenting the fact that women were taking four weeks when they had a baby, because they weren’t bringing in business,” McCann said. “And I think that attitude has completely changed over my lifetime.”
Colorado’s statewide data shows that while similar numbers of men and women are active attorneys in their 30s, the number of active female attorneys drops as women get older. Men don’t see as steep a decline as they enter their 40s and 50s, suggesting that women leave the profession more frequently than men.
“A huge piece of it is the caretaking that still tends to fall more on women, even in heterosexual relationships where both parents work,” said Emma Garrison, president of the Colorado Women’s Bar Association. “…Women are more likely to take on the primary parenting role.”
Also, while the ranks of law schools, associates and entry-level attorneys typically have ample women, there is a dearth of women in leadership positions, Garrison said.
“If you’re an associate, and grinding away for hours and hours, and the partnership ranks you see don’t have many women, there can be a (sense of), ‘Well, what’s the point of me continuing to run myself into the ground if there’s not a place for me on a leadership path?'” she said.
A lack of women in leadership is not a problem in the Denver District Attorney’s Office. Nearly half of chief deputy district attorneys — senior supervisors — are women, McCann said. In the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, six of nine chief deputy district attorneys are women, Hopper said.
Initially, after McCann was first elected, the top four positions in the office were all held by women, she said.
“I saw a picture of the four of us and I thought, ‘Wow, should I have a man? Maybe this isn’t right?'” McCann said. “And then I thought to myself, ‘You know what, for 200 years, the top people have always been men. So it’s OK to have the top people be all women.'”
Across the legal profession in Colorado, racial diversity has lagged behind gender diversity, with white people making up the vast majority of attorneys. A full 83% of Colorado’s judges are white, and 84% of the 7,000 attorneys who answered a voluntary survey by the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel in 2022 identified themselves as white. The state’s judges are about 58% male and 42% female, according to the Colorado Judicial Branch.
McCann said her office is working to better retain attorneys of color, noting the importance of diversity of all types.
“I do think that’s an area where DA’s offices in general have had difficulty recruiting people of color, so that’s a challenge,” she said.
Maggie Conboy, assistant district attorney in the Denver DA’s office, said that, while at the start of her career, she had to correct a judge who called her “sweet,” the profession has now gotten to a point where an attorney’s gender is a non-factor.
“I have seen that change remarkably,” she said. “I don’t think at all now about gender differences, whether I’m in the courtroom, whether I’m dealing with opposing counsel. It’s a non-issue.”
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