California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Updated at 6:47 p.m.

California's judiciary added more women and grew slightly more racially diverse in Gov. Gavin Newsom's first year in office, a report released Monday by the Judicial Council revealed.

The numbers, disclosed in an annual summary required by state law, show 648 women serving on trial and appellate courts in 2019, up slightly from 633 a year earlier. Men still accounted for almost 63% of California's judges.

The percentage of judges who described themselves as a race or ethnicity other than white only inched upward from 31.6% in 2018 to 32.5%.

The small statistical changes reflect the relatively few appointments and nominations—16—that Newsom made to the bench in 2019 after outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown filled most vacancies in his final months in office. Of Newsom's appointments, 11 were women and nine were nonwhite.

Related figures released by the state bar show that of the 62 judicial candidates the governor sent to the Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation for review in 2019, half were women and 38.7% were either nonwhite or registered as "unknown" race.

The surveys of judges and candidates also ask about sexual orientation. Nearly 25% of judges did not answer; of those that did respond, 3.5% identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Just two judicial candidates sent to the Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation last year were gay, according to the state bar report. None were identified as lesbian or bisexual.

The numbers reflect the challenges Newsom faces as he attempts, as he has said, to create a diverse state judiciary. Fewer than 37% of Californians describe themselves as "white only." But a large majority of the state's 1,732 judges are white.

And the pipeline feeding the state bench, California's bar, is less ethnically diverse than the general population. Sixty-eight percent of state bar licensees are white, according to a 2019 survey.

Newsom is under pressure from various political and civil rights organizations to pick a Supreme Court nominee from an underrepresented group. Newsom's first appellate justice nominee, Teri Jackson, was confirmed to the First District Court of Appeal in January. Jackson is the first black woman to serve on the San Francisco appellate bench.

In separate data released by the governor late Monday, Newsom disclosed that of the more than 460 lawyers and judges who applied for bench positions in 2019, just under 60 percent were men. Nearly four in 10 were applicants of color or did not report their race. Almost 9 percent of would-be judges were LGBT, 4.3 percent were veterans and 3.3 percent said they were disabled.

Read the 2020 demographic data below:

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