Think it's tough for a gal to climb the ladder at a law firm? Well, law firms are paradigms of progressiveness compared to Wall Street. At most big law firms, women at least have each other for company.

Not so in those high-glossed halls of high finance where women are getting scarce: "Young women are becoming more rare in the country's banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies. Since 2000, the number of women between the ages of 20 and 35 working in finance has dropped by 315,000, or 16.5 percent, while the number of men in that age range grew by 93,000, or 7.3 percent," reports the Wall Street Journal, which looked at data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that tracked finance workers from 2002 to 2009.

That decline is especially steep among the youngest women--a 21.8 percent drop for those age 20 to 24, notes the WSJ: "That suggests young women are either not as attracted to entry-level finance-industry jobs or aren't being hired for the posts that are available."

Why should women lawyers care about what's happening to their Wall Street sisters? Because their counterparts in finance are arguably a rich source of business--and that source is drying up.

It's unfortunate timing: Women are steadily flocking into the legal profession, while women on Wall Street are leaving in droves. Women's progress might be stagnant in the legal profession--but at least it's not regressive.

Theories abound as to why women are disappearing on Wall Street. There's the usual women life/work balance explanation. Grace Tsiang, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, "theorized that these women are having and raising children rather than staying on the job," reports the WSJ.

Life/work balance conflicts have become the fall-back explanation for why women quit these days. But, come on, does that explain that steep drop in the 20- to 24-year-old group?

I suspect something else is going on. Could it be that Wall Street is much more chauvinistic than law firms? Certainly, it's notable that major investment banks like Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and now Goldman Sachs have all faced big sexual discrimination lawsuits.

There's no shortage of anecdotes about sexism on the Street. One former Lehman Brother banker told the WSJ that "her female coworkers got smaller bonuses because they didn't golf or pal around with male managing directors." She added, "There were a couple that tried to be buddy-buddy with the guys, but it never really worked. It wasn't like the 1960s, getting slapped on the butt all the time. [The discrimination] was very subtle."

Maybe subtle. Maybe not. But the bottom line is that Wall Street is a man's world--increasingly so. And people wonder why women lawyers can't rake in those big institutional clients.

Related post: "Is Equal Pay More of an Issue for Women J.D.s or Women M.B.A.s?""

 Do you have topics you'd like to discuss or tips to share? E-mail The Careerist's chief blogger, Vivia Chen, at [email protected]

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