Missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may be spurring more LDS women to pursue law school.

“If you are working 60 hours a week and dealing with rejection, and dealing with people who don’t agree with you, maybe law school doesn’t scare you as much as it did coming out of undergrad,” said Stacie Stewart, the dean of admissions at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School.

The J. Reuben Clark Law School’s incoming class of 2021 is the law school’s first predominantly female class. Women make up 52 percent of the 104-student class, according to Stewart.

“This is significant; this is historic,” Stewart said.

Women make up about 51 percent of law school students nationwide, according to 2018 statistics from the American Bar Association.

BYU’s law school has traditionally seen women make up student enrollment in the 30 to 40 percent range, according to Stewart. Fifty-two percent of BYU’s total student body is male, according to statistics posted on BYU’s website.

There were 10 women in BYU law school’s first class of 147 students in the 1970s.

Stewart said law schools nationwide have seen applications decrease since the Great Recession and have begun to see creeping increases again. Applications to BYU’s law school are up 6.7 percent this year, with a 20.7 percent increase in applications from women.

“This isn’t a situation where we just admitted more women to admit more women, because you still have to be qualified to be eligible for the program,” Stewart said.

Stewart has noticed a significant number of female applicants mention their experiences doing 18-month missions for the LDS Church in their applications. Stewart said women wrote that while on their missions they realized injustices in the world and became motivated to do something about them.

“The women who are coming to law school are aware and interested in being involved in the legal processes associated with immigration,” Stewart said.

The church lowered the age limit for women to go on a mission from 21 to 19 in 2012, spurring an influx of female missionaries.

There has been increased attention on what the law school does in regards to immigration, and other efforts in the past five years have aimed at recruiting women to the law school.

The school’s Women in Law series tackles legal topics to educate students on the legal field and make female law professors visible on campus. The school also hosts an annual Women in Law luncheon and an alumni networking event sponsored by the Women in Law alumni group.

Stewart said the efforts educate students that a career in law isn’t always what they see on TV and there are legal experiences outside of the traditional courtroom experience, such as working with nonprofits or advocating for women and children.

Stewart said BYU’s law school also may be attractive to female students due to its low cost of tuition in comparison to other law schools. She said 22 percent of the most recent graduating class graduated without any student debt and for those who did, their average student debt was $53,000.

“That could be one year of tuition at another law school,” Stewart said.

For now, it’s unclear if the surge in women will be an ongoing trend, but Stewart is confident the class of 2021’s women will make it through to graduation.

“We have very, very few students who drop out,” Stewart said.