NICOLA Sturgeon eh? But back to me. I was born in the 1970s and studied law in the 80s (as did Ms Sturgeon as it happens) but if either of us went back to university now we’d notice big changes. Back in those days, the law students were mostly male, whereas now it’s the other way round. Question is: what does it mean?

The fact that the changes are happening was confirmed this week by figures from law firm Lawtons which show that in the last year, the number of women applying to UK law courses rose by 13% taking female applications over 100,000, twice as much as male ones. The changes are also reflected in the numbers doing the LLB or DipLP in Scotland, which is currently around 65-70% female. Traineeship numbers are probably about the same as well.

On the face of it, these figures are only positive. Reacting to them, Dr Adrienne Barnett, senior lecturer at Brunel University, who also studied law in the 80s, said comparing the situation then and now, she thought having more female students enhanced the collegiality of the students and peer support. And if this is the start of a re-balancing of a profession that’s been male-dominated for hundreds of years, that’s a good thing.

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But having spoken to lawyers and academics about this, I worry there are negatives in the figures as well. We need to ask, for example, why the numbers of women applying to law are really increasing. Perhaps it’s simple; maybe a legal career just looks more attractive to young women students than it used to and more of them fancy doing it. Fair enough.

But everyone I spoke to also raised the possibility that so many women are applying to law courses because other courses such as engineering and science are less welcoming. The most recent figures from UCAS suggest around 35% of students in STEM subjects are women, but on some of the courses it’s very low indeed. My godson has just started engineering in Glasgow and tells me it’s massively male-dominated. According to UCAS, 81% of engineering and technology students are men.

We also see problems when we start to get into the nitty-gritty of the law profession. In the lower ranks – traineeships, junior solicitors – there is broad equality; in fact, there’s a skew towards women. But even though the male/female balance of the courses has been changing since the 90s, men still dominate the senior legal roles. As with STEM courses, it begs the question how welcoming the upper reaches of law really are for women.

There are also questions about the possible consequences for women in general. The medical establishment for example has been talking about the “feminisation of medicine” for years and its possible effects. There are some who point out that female-dominated jobs and specialities are often lower paid, and think the feminisation of parts of medicine – GPs for example – could have the same effect: a loss of status, influence and pay.

Others think it’s already happening. I spoke to the Edinburgh GP and writer Dr Peter Dorward about this and he expressed some concern that the conditions GPs work in could get even worse because of attitudes to female-dominated jobs and men leaving to go into more “respected” parts of the profession with more money. No one’s denying that GPs are paid relatively well but there’s clearly a big gap between pay for GPs and consultants, where men still largely dominate.

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All of this raises questions for medicine and law – how welcoming are they for women? do we value women doctors and lawyers as much as men? But it also raises wider questions for patients and clients too. On the subject of GPs, there are concerns the part-time working that has increased with the number of women in the profession may mean staffing problems and knock-on effects on patients trying to get an appointment. Could part-time working have a similar effect in the legal profession?

But there’s another, more radical way of looking at it. The current ways of working in law could, in time, be difficult for many of the young students starting their courses. And a profession that doesn’t change as fast as the students do – and the law profession is notoriously resistant to change and takes a long time to do it – will remain male-dominated at the senior levels. In other words: it’s good news that so many women are studying law. But the real question is: how many will still be there in 20 years?