Reducing Gender Pay Gaps in law

Gender Pay Gap

Reducing Gender Pay Gaps in law

Some of the biggest gender pay gaps reported this year have been in law firms. In my experience two things are driving this:

■ women lawyers struggling to balance work and home deliberately move themselves off promotion tracks, or

■ they stay on a partner track but opt for practice areas more easily combined with responsibilities at home, but which are less financially rewarding.

My research identified four key barriers to women’s progression in legal firms; all linked to flexible working. Extending access to flexible working has been identified as a proven measure in supporting women into senior roles. It is one of the most frequently listed actions in the improvement plans that accompany pay gap reports. So how does a lack of access to flexibility create barriers to women’s progression?

1. Women rarely discuss their need for flexibility, instead they make assumptions about what is possible within the firm. Typically, this means moving to a career limiting role or resigning. When that happens, the firm treats it as a woman’s choice and rarely explores the underlying reasons. A deeper conversation about what she needs at this stage in her life opens the possibility of restructuring her job, so the firm retains her skills. While most firms have flexible working policies these may sit alongside cultural assumptions that flexible working is not possible for those who want to make Partner.

2. Concerns around having happy clients can make Partners reluctant to agree non-standard working. In a highly competitive business environment, there are concerns that clients will be lost if the firm is not able to deliver services more quickly than competitors. When I talked to the corporate clients of some of the biggest City law firms, I discovered such fears were unfounded. Clients are also navigating flexible arrangements among their staff and are sympathetic towards the idea of their lawyers working flexibly. Clients also said they chose lawyers on the basis of expertise rather than rapid turnaround of work. The message here was that while some work will always be urgent, some can be delivered to deadlines that accommodate flexible arrangements.

A further challenge, particularly once a woman has reached Partner level, is the heavy emphasis on client development, much of which traditionally happened during evening events (although this is likely to have changed over the past 18 months with covid restrictions). While client development is an essential part of the role, working late into the evening need not be. For example, I met a female partner who had agreed a 50% arrangement, working until early afternoon before leaving to collect her daughter from school.

All her client development activities were focussed round breakfast and lunch events which not only suited her but was also popular with her clients and potential clients.

3. Those who chose to work flexibly in law firms often suffered from the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ syndrome. The allocation of assignments, particularly those which might lead to development and promotion, favoured people working in the office. I’ve no doubt some of this will have changed as firms adapted over the past 18 months to home working. However, there is a further caveat here that when it comes to work allocation it’s important to watch for unconscious biases that may arise. Even where she has not expressly said so, there’s often an assumption (particularly by men) that the mother of young children doesn’t want ‘stretch assignments’ as she is prioritising family over work.

4. Before the pandemic many of the structures around training of junior staff and the delivery of client work were based around the office. While these will undoubtedly have changed during lockdown, it’s important that firms do not view this as a short term fix but build on lessons learnt to make remote working more accessible for fee earners.

During my research I spoke to a number of senior Partners in City law firms. All understood the commercial benefits of encouraging women into Partnership; and that their clients increasingly preferred working with diverse teams that reflected their own demographics.

To reduce gender pay gaps and support women into senior roles here are 4 things firms can do:

1. Check your practices and cultural assumptions around flexible working, promotion and work allocation to ensure women have real choices. Create environments where open and honest discussions around the challenges working mothers face are possible. Don’t simply dismiss a woman’s decision to move to a back-office role or leave as ‘her choice’.

2. Publicise good practice already happening ‘under the radar’ in your firm. Look for role models and publicise them. Where women are aware that combining motherhood with being a Partner is possible, they are more likely to go for it.

3. Encourage people to think creatively about flexible working. Very often it will be needed for a relatively short period of time but will pay dividends in supporting women’s careers. For example, the female partner I talked about earlier had agreed a three-year reduced hours arrangement.

4. Think about how you manage your clients’ expectations. Are they getting in the way of accommodating flexible schedules? Is there scope for renegotiating? ■

Anna Meller

Anna Meller is an expert in flexible, remote and hybrid-working, author and authority on work-life balance. Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annameller/