The General Legal Counsels of 170 large companies in the U.S. and 65 large companies in the U.K. recently signed Charters inviting law firms to gender balance. This should be an astonishing competitive opportunity for first-mover firms who recognize balance means business. Nine of the 10 U.K. firms in our 2019 Gender Balance Scorecard of Law Firms in the U.K. still have more than 70% male partners. This in a sector where women have been the majority of law school graduates for decades in the U.K. and recently became the majority in the U.S. Increasingly frustrated at the seeming immobility of the statistics, women are leaving law firms to join their corporate clients. The women law firms aren’t promoting to partner are electing to become clients instead. This offers a recipe for success for firms deciding to balance - and a route to reputational risk for the rest.
20-first Gender Balance Scorecard - Focus on U.K. Legal Sector
20-first's UK Law Firm Gender Balance Scorecard 2019
Competitive Edge or Persistent Problem?
As the corporate sector leans into gender balancing their workforces, they are suggesting their suppliers – from law firms to search firms and business schools – consider balancing their own act too. The time may be ripe to avoid a perfect storm and gain a competitive edge instead. Here’s a summary of where the legal sector stands today, and three steps for those ready for some creative disruption.
Law firms provide one of the more graphic examples of persistent gender imbalances of any sector. In both the U.S. and U.K., women are the majority of law school graduates and law firm recruits. In the U.K., they make up over 60% of graduating solicitors, over 50% of practicing solicitors but only 19% of equity partners in the top U.K. firms. They have made slow progress up the ranks into equity partnership, and it’s becoming increasingly visible – and embarrassing.
Box-Ticking vs Balancing
Nobody debates the gender imbalances. Over the past decade, the ratio of men in the equity level in US firms has been reduced from 89% to … 80%. Associates are almost at parity, while non-equity partners are 70% men, down from 77% a decade ago. This differs from firm to firm, but not massively.
Things are moving, but perceptions of the pace of change unsurprisingly differ by gender. “The male partners of law firms are generally proud of the progress they’ve made,” says Christina Blacklaws, President of the Law Society of England and Wales, which recently ran a large study, involving some 8,000 lawyers across 13 jurisdictions, on Equality in the Law (report available here). “While women lawyers are deeply frustrated at the pace and modesty of the change they’ve seen over the 20 years they’ve represented the majority of law firms’ recruiting intake.”
Stephen Denyer, the Law Society’s Director of Strategic Relationships, facilitated debates with male law firm partners exploring how they have been addressing gender balance. “They talked about agile working, shared parental leave and unconscious bias training.” Similar efforts have been common in the U.S., with largely similar outcomes. The U.S. National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) reports that firms have conducted a wide range of initiatives, from women’s networks to inclusion training. It doesn’t seem to be yielding results. But that hasn’t stopped the generalized roll-out of what seems like largely tick-the-box diversity initiatives, according to the report:
- 76% of firms offer firm-wide implicit bias training
- 79% diversity and inclusion training
- 65% reported bias interrupting procedures in at least one of: recruitment (89%), hiring (86%), performance evaluation (70%), promotion (58%), elevation to non-equity partner (44%) and equity partner (54%).
Not only do these efforts not yield results, NAWL reports that 83% of people surveyed don’t even seem to notice their existence.
Despite all the box-ticking, this perception that little has been done is widespread. We hear this often in firms we work with. Partners are skeptical, not so much about gender balance, but more about how it is being addressed. Denyer commented that “the most challenging comments came from in-house legal counsel, who come from companies that are much further along, and are putting pressure on law firms to catch up.”
Catching Up With Clients
So many initiatives, so little real progress. Law firms may feel they have tried ‘everything,’ but they haven’t really started seriously yet. Women lawyers certainly aren’t convinced. A McKinsey report found that “while all law firms call gender diversity a very important or a top priority, only 36% of women believe that gender diversity is a priority for their firm, compared with 62% of men.” Which is why women are increasingly leaving to join their clients or start their own firms.
“The bottom line is the situation isn’t likely to change until the governance model changes and moves towards a more corporate model,” says Blacklaws. Yet Stephen Denyer says governance and partnership models were never addressed in the male debates.
Dana Denis-Smith, the Founder of Obelisk, a flexible and female-friendly law firm, also questions the creation of the salaried partner layer — people get the partner title but don’t share in the profits or have a say in how things are run. That was, she suggests, simply a PR fig leaf to make the partnership figures looks better. “The whole business model needs to be opened up,” she told the Financial Times, echoing Blacklaws.
Getting Serious About Sex: 3 Steps to Gender Balance
Stop all the fussing with initiatives and tick-the-box exercises that aren’t delivering. Start with the basics: an honest conversation, some education, and an open mind to changing the way things are done. Until three things are in place, most law firms’ efforts will do more harm than good. They exacerbate gender fatigue and frustration without moving the dial.
FIRST, ALIGN PARTNERS
Get the right people having the right conversation. Put the issue of gender balance on the senior partnership’s agenda, with a put-up or shut-up option. Get alignment among partners on whether it’s a strategic priority, what’s the degree of urgency and the expected benefits of gender balance. Finding agreement on firm-wide strategic priorities is a hard sell at the best of times in partnerships, which makes this a slightly different issue than in corporates where CEOs can more easily impose change. If you don’t take the time to build buy-in and agree objectives and an action plan, no initiative yields results, which explains why so many have failed. Here’s how:
- LISTEN: In lengthy qualitative (and anonymous) interviews that we run with partners to suss out their perception of their current situations, we always find they have a lot to say, and few opportunities to say it. Many are frustrated and feel they cannot speak honestly about gender issues. Partners always span a segmentation we refer to as the Progressive, the Patient and the Plodding. The key is to get the progressives involved in convincing their peers to balance things out across the board.
- GET THE FACTS: Prepare the groundwork for what we call a Strategic Debate. An honest conversation about what partners want the firm to look like in two to ten years – and what they are willing to do to get there. A fact-based start is the best guarantee of a credible analysis of what’s going on. It’s also aligns everyone in their understanding of the existing situation. One firm we worked with was convinced they had made no progress over the past five years, when in fact they had, putting them in an entirely different position and mindset in building their gender strategy.
- ARGUE IT OUT: In one-day off-sites, we invite partners to have it out – with each other. These sessions accomplish several things. They give partners a chance to have an honest discussion (often for the first time) about gender issues. The only way, in my experience, to get partners to buy an action plan on gender issues is if they design it themselves. Law firm partners are the only ones who really understand the workings of their own systems. It’s essential that they design the solution to gender balance. Not HR, not their Head of Diversity (if they have one). If they want it gender balanced, they’ll need to make it happen. No one else can.
FLEX THE MODEL
Review the business and partnership models and their inherent assumptions. Consider developing alternative options to the current one-size-fits all model of most law firms. It’s the current uniformity of the system that is eliminating people. Check the readiness of partners to innovate and flex the current system – we find it’s usually a far more popular option than many think is possible.
- CAREER TRACKS: The up-or-out, linear and unbroken career models remain dominant in many firms. Yet the combination of millennials, perennials (aka seniors), dual career parents and women all clamouring for some flexibility means the majority in many firms is finding it hard to keep up the old ways. Burnout, suicide and divorce are too common. The timing of the current partnership track is at war with most people’s kids, marriages and sanity levels. Shifting the age of partnership both earlier and later, letting older partners work flexibly rather than retiring, acknowledging that longevity means some people may want to continue working longer and differently.
- UNLOCK THE LOCKSTEP: The heart of the issue in most firms is money, and how partners slice up the pie. Different firms will have different models, from the lockstep to ‘eat what you kill,’ that cover the range from extremely individual incentive pay to more collective approaches. None are yet very open to flexing these systems. Each firm leans to a dominant system that everyone must fit into. But the profile of partners is evolving, and firms may find it easier to build support for a fresh look at the partner track. A growing number of older partners may turn out to be surprise advocates of a multiplicity of models once they see it can allow them to continue working flexibly beyond some forced retirement rules which exist in many firms.
BUILD COMPETENCE
Build ‘gender bilingual’ management skills for all partners (male and female) so they are empowered and good at attracting, retaining and promoting talent of all genders. This means educating partners and people managers about gender differences and how to work effectively across them.
- FIND THE GAPS: Firms have mostly managed to balance their junior and mid-level talent pipelines. There is usually a steep inflection point at Senior Associate or Partner level, and then another, steeper decline at Equity partner. Pinpointing these inflection points is key to making sure they are addressed and eradicated.
- LEARN THE DIFFERENCE: Despite mountains of research about gender differences, most partners pride themselves on being ‘gender blind’ when what they need to become is ‘gender bilingual,’ familiar with the differences between genders and skilled at managing equitably across them, both for talent and client management. Workplaces dominated and designed by male partnerships don’t see their cultures and systems as ‘masculine,’ they see them as meritocratic. Get everyone (male, female and non-binary) familiar with gender differences (a more constructive way of framing ‘unconscious bias’) and how they link to the systemic issues creating the current imbalances.
- LEAD ‘GENDER BILINGUALLY’: The bottom line on balancing partnerships, or any other business, is that it takes leadership will and skill. Partners will only balance their firms if they are convinced it’s worth it, are skilled at implementing it, and proactively push balance into being. It also needs to focus on adapting to gender differences, rather than trying to get women to swallow the current model. All the inclusion training in the world, won’t yield an understanding of how to understand other genders. This is why too many initiatives don’t deliver. Some partners don’t buy it, others don’t know how to do it, and others are resisting any change. Until they align, skill up and move to step 3, expect more of the same.
The bottom line? Gender balance has more to do with leadership than it does with anything intrinsic about professional services firms or their clients – or women for that matter. The few law firms (or offices of law firms) that have made the most progress on gender balance had leaders who prioritised it and personally drove the change. TAJ in France had a resolute Managing Partner determined to create a gender-balanced meritocracy. He had to push hard and consistently to overcome a range of resistances.
In the end, law is like every other sector, where gender balance is a matter of leadership and strategy. It’s not really about women and parenting and bias. It’s about leaders and power and the rules of the game. You think if anyone understood the power of policy and rules to change the game it would be lawyers. In fact, they probably do.
