WASHINGTON

If President Barack Obama wants to make the Supreme Court more diverse, he has a wider range of options than any of his predecessors. When Ronald Reagan was president, only about 40 women served on the federal bench, the most common source of Supreme Court nominees.

Today, more than 200 women hold federal judgeships, along with 88 African-Americans, 60 Hispanics and eight Asian Americans.

All but four of the 110 Supreme Court justices in the nation's history have been white men. Two are African-American men, Clarence Thomas and the late Thurgood Marshall, and two are white women, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O'Connor.

There has never been a Hispanic, Asian American or Native American justice.

Ginsburg is the only female justice at the moment and most of the candidates whom Obama is considering are women.

The president also has a much wider range of experienced lawyers to draw from than Reagan did when he reached down to a midlevel appeals court in Arizona to nominate O'Connor.

``The pool was simply not as broad or as deep as it is now,'' said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center.

Before Jimmy Carter came to the White House in 1977, presidents beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt had put just eight women on the federal bench. Carter added 40 female federal judges in four years, including Ginsburg.

Today, 212 full-time federal judges are women, more than a quarter of the federal judiciary.

State Supreme Court judges — many of them elected — have an even higher share of women. Nearly a third of the judges on those courts are women. On 22 out of 53 courts, women make up at least 40 percent of the judges. (The list includes Washington, D.C., as well as two high courts each for Oklahoma and Texas.)

The rise in the number of women as judges reflects steady growth in the number of female lawyers. About a third of lawyers, as well as roughly half of law school graduates, are women.