I don’t mean women are just as good as men at lawyering. I mean they’re better. Let me explain.

But first a story. I have a distant connection to recently deceased former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

O’Connor grew up on an Arizona cattle ranch. Her home was nine miles from the nearest paved road and didn’t have running water or electricity until she was seven.

She was very smart. At age 16, she left the ranch and went to Stanford to earn a degree in Economics. In 1952, she graduated third in her class from Stanford Law School. (That was back when Stanford was still teaching law and law students were still expected to learn it.)

Along the way, four men asked O’Connor to marry them, including future Chief Justice William Rehnquist. (That was back when men asked women to marry them and women were expected to answer yes or no.) She turned down the first three, including Rehnquist, and married the fourth.

After graduation she applied to be a lawyer at several law firms. One was the storied firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, a prestige firm based in Los Angeles at the time but now a global powerhouse with about 2,000 lawyers around the world. In 1952 when O’Connor applied, Gibson Dunn had never had a woman lawyer. They were not unusual in that regard; less than 1% of lawyers were women.

Gibson Dunn didn’t exactly reject her application. They did something more embarrassing in retrospect. They offered her a job as a legal secretary – a skilled and respectable position, but not one you go to law school for.

In defense of Gibson Dunn, no other firms offered her even that. O’Connor finally took a non-paying job in a small California district attorney’s office. She later opened her own sole practitioner strip-mall law office. She took five years off to raise young children. It took 12 years before she had a law firm job.

O’Connor held no grudge against Gibson Dunn. In fact, she made light of the matter decades later in a David Letterman interview, and spoke fondly about the firm at its 100^th anniversary some years ago.

O’Connor’s appointment to the Supreme Court was rooted in her involvement in Arizona politics. She was appointed a state court judge – a respectable job but not a prestigious one – and then was a state legislator. She volunteered for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, and came to the attention of Ronald Reagan. The rest is history.

I was partner at Gibson Dunn many years after O’Connor was offered the legal secretary job. It was the finest institution I’ve ever been privileged to be part of. And notwithstanding their mistake with the future Justice O’Connor – a mistake that lands them in good company – it was also the smartest. And the most profitable, for which I am forever grateful.

Gibson Dunn is known as a politically conservative place, but that’s a shallow analysis. It’s true that they represented the winning side in Bush v. Gore, via their renowned and conservative Supreme Court advocate Ted Olson. But when Ted was once asked which of his 65 Supreme Court arguments he was most proud of, he immediately replied that it was the case establishing a Constitutional right to gay marriage.

I thought at the time that Ted was on the wrong side of that issue, as did much of America. Unsurprisingly, time has proved Ted right and me wrong.

I should also note that the current Managing Partner of Gibson Dunn is a superstar transactional lawyer in their New York office named Barbara Becker. O’Connor must have smiled when she heard last year that the partners of Gibson Dunn had elected Barbara to lead the firm.

Enough of the stories.

O’Connor showed that women are fully able to practice law, including as judges and Supreme Court justices. In retrospect, that seems obvious, but it wasn’t at the time.

Here’s something that likewise will seem obvious someday, but is not yet. Women are not only just as good as men at practicing law, but perhaps better.

Practicing law involves communication, language, people skills, balancing complicated facts and competing interests, being careful, and paying close attention to detail. Women tend to be good at those things, especially the attention to detail part. (Have you ever watched a woman crochet?)

Men are typically less good at those things. (Have you ever watched a man crochet?)

In a few generations, expect most lawyers to be women. Even now, about 56% of law students are women. (Here’s an amusing aside: The liberal American Bar Association used to keep track of the percentage of women law students, but they recently deleted their web page on it, so you have to look elsewhere. I assume that’s because the ABA is suddenly unable to define “woman.”)

There are implications for other professions. Medicine is one. The sort of linear thinking that is men’s forte is important to get you into med school – you have to survive undergraduate calculus and organic chemistry and quantum physics. But physicians don’t actually use any of those fields, just as engineers don’t use differential equations but are required to take a course in the subject.

What physicians use is similar to what lawyers use – instinct, experience, communication with patients/clients and other professionals, and attention to detail – along with persistence with the insurance companies. At most of those things, women are usually better.

There is one important endeavor where men are generally better by nature. It’s starting and growing a business. That’s because men by nature are risk-takers in comparison to women, partly due to their hormones. Only risk-takers hunt mastodons – or venture capitalists. That earns them status or money which makes them appealing to women because they have the resources to father a family. Those men consequentially propagate their risk-taking genes. See, Musk, Elon and his 11 children.

Conversely, risk-taking women who hunt mastodons – or venture capitalists – make for poor moms (risk-taking historically was not a advantageous quality in a mother) and therefore tend not to propagate their risk-taking genes.

For that reason, men will continue to surpass women in starting and growing businesses where risk-taking is part of the game. (In managing large existing businesses where risk aversion becomes more important than risk taking, men may have less of an edge.)

The men in my readership cry, “But … but …. let’s go back to that linear thinking stuff that men are good at. Won’t there always be a demand for that?”

No. It’s true that men are typically superior to women in linear thinking, at least at the elite levels. That’s why men dominate women in high levels of mathematics, physics and chess, and always will. But in chess, the best men are already inferior to relatively simple computers, and it appears they soon will be in other linear thinking fields as well. When it comes to linear thinking, no human – man or woman – is as good as today’s ordinary computers.

That leaves just one other field where men will dominate in the future: stud work. When men reach the ripe old age of about 33, they’ll be put out to stud.

It won’t be for their semen; science will already have that firmly in hand. It will be for women’s amusement. Computers will never be as enjoyable and amusing to a woman as a man seeking to impress her.

I hope to live that long.

Glenn Beaton practiced law in the Federal Courts, including the Supreme Court.