CHICAGO – A recently released study by Northwestern School of Law professor James Lindgren is shedding light on the underrepresentation of Christians and Republicans among American law professors.

Lindgren wrote in “Measuring Diversity: Law Faculties in 1997 and 2013” that “affirmative action has succeeded so thoroughly that, compared to lawyers, the largest underrepresented groups in law schools today are white Christians, Christians, white Republicans and Republicans.”

In other words, women and minorities are overrepresented on law school faculties, while white conservatives are underrepresents, when compared to the same proportions among all lawyers or the population in general.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

Lindgren’s research shows that conservative women, however, are also vastly underrepresented, Mediaite reports.

“In proportional terms, the most underrepresented large group in law teaching is female Republicans, which are at only 5 percent of parity with the working population and 9 percent of parity with the lawyer population,” Lindgren wrote, according to The National Law Journal.

“On law faculties there are about 10 times as many Jewish women as Republican women, though in the full-time working population there are 24 times as many Republican women as Jewish women.”

Lindgren gathered his data from the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools, as ales as a survey on law professors’ political and religious views. He then compared that data to government data on all lawyers in America, and the working population in general.

“After four decades of hiring to make law professors more representative of American society, law faculties are probably less representative ideologically than they have been for at least several decades,” Lindgren wrote.

Lindgren argues that the data suggests diversity hiring and affirmative action hiring aren’t the same thing.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

“ … (I)n law school faculty hiring, diversity does not equal affirmative action; the diversity groups are not the same as the affirmative action groups,” he wrote. “Further, hiring women and minorities of the sort usually hired will increase the variety of viewpoints on the left, but will make law faculties less representative of the political views of the general public.”

So, despite affirmative action hiring has essentially skewed law school faculty toward liberal Democrats and minorities, while minimizing the white, Christian, Republican viewpoints that dominate American society.

“In terms of absolute numbers, the dominant group in law teaching today remains Democrats, both male and female,” Lindgren wrote.

“Because in the general public both white women and white men tend now to vote Republican, law faculties are probably less representative ideologically than they have been for several decades — a disappointing result after four decades of hiring intended to make law professors more representative of American society.”

Ohio State University law professor Deborah Merritt told the National Law Journal “she was heartened by Lindgren’s findings” that more minorities and women are hired to teach at law schools.

Merritt, who has also researched law faculty demographics, believes that race and gender discrimination still persist in hiring, however, and “constrain advancement within the academy.”

She believes law schools should look to attorneys with actual experience in their fields to improve lessons in the classroom.

“Unless we’re willing to integrate our faculties with former practitioners of all types, we will not prepare students to practice in ways that meet unmet legal needs,” she told the Journal.

The Journal reports that other studies, such as a UC Berkeley School of Law study that looked at new professor hires in 2010, have also highlighted the fact that far more law faculty are openly liberal than conservative.