It’s an endless source of fascination to Supreme Court watchers: Where do the baby law clerks come from? Who clerks at the court, what they do afterwards, and how the justices find and hire them are not just matters of careerist inside baseball. A Supreme Court clerkship offers warp-speed career advancement within the highest legal circles. (As researcher Todd Peppers has put it, “No other internship program in the history of the United States has produced as impressive and diverse a collection of individuals as the U.S. Supreme Court law clerk corps.”) Law firms offer recent Supreme Court clerks bonuses of more than $300,000, and the pool of lawyers who file appeals at the high court is composed principally of former Supreme Court clerks. Three current justices are former clerks: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer. So were Justice John Paul Stevens and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Also: A Supreme Court clerkship gives 36 young lawyers each year a chance to leave their fingerprints all over constitutional law.

In recent decades, a few patterns have emerged. Clerks have become more and more ideologically aligned with the views of their bosses. As clerkships have become more prized, the pool of clerks has become more exceptional. And the hiring of minority law clerks has long proven challenging at the high court. A study undertaken by Tony Mauro in 1998 found that “fewer than 2 percent of the 394 clerks hired by the current justices during their respective tenures were African-American, and even fewer were Hispanic. About 5 percent were Asian. Women represent an increasing proportion of clerks, but they still amount to only one-fourth of the total.” Those numbers haven’t improved all that much in the past 17 years, despite discussion and debate. When Mauro updated his data in 2014, the percentage of clerks who are women increased from about one-quarter to one-third, but the number of minority clerks, especially those not of Asian heritage, remained low. And the problem has been especially vexing for those troubled by the fact that while women currently represent half of all law school graduates, they remain only a third of the Supreme Court clerk pool.

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Writing in the Washington Post in May, professor Deborah L. Rhode noted that 88 percent of lawyers are white, and that “women constitute more than a third of the profession, but only about a fifth of law firm partners, general counsels of Fortune 500 corporations and law school deans.” In an article from last year in the Wall Street Journal, Jennifer Smith described studies showing that women still represent only 17 percent of so-called equity partners at firms, female law firm partners still command on average 10 percent less for their services, and female associates are regularly billed out at lower rates.