Gurmeet Kaur, Pinsent Masons; MESIA

Ultimately, the key to improving diversity and gender balance in any organisation is having accountable leaders and support from senior management

GURMEET KAUR

Partner at Pinsent Masons, and Communications and Marketing Director, MESIA

What aspects of Pinsent Mason's gender empowerment programmes are you most proud of and why?

At Pinsent Masons, we strongly believe that having a variety of people is far better for our clients and our firm because it means there is a variety of perspectives on offer which helps us make better decisions and offer innovative solutions for out clients. Research shows that businesses with a better gender balance in the senior management team are financially more successful.

Pinsent Masons started the SKY programme to achieve gender balance in 2013. Since then, we have achieved amazing progress with more than 25% women in partnership , 44% female membership on our board, and 44% of our internal promotions to 'partner' in the last three years have been women.

We identified a number of barriers to the progression of women into senior leadership position, such as the lack of role models, the need for flexible working, lack of clarity and transparency around career paths and promotion, perception of a culture of presentism and the need for more structured support to overcome disruption to career progression caused by periods of maternity leave.

We established a number of programmes to address this. For example, we now track our talent pipelines more systematically and produce gender balanced promotion shortlists (reflecting male and female ratios) with a comply or explain approach so the group leader will need to justify promotion lists that do not reflect the gender balance. In this regard, our external recruitment agencies have also been briefed and instructed to present gender balanced shortlists for lateral hires.

We have a programme of inclusive behaviour training across the business to tackle unconscious bias. These programmes help leaders understand the different perspective of their team, taking into account different aspects, such as upbringing and culture.

We have introduced female perspective into management through reciprocal mentoring. The reciprocal mentoring programme is one where the mentor and mentee has the opportunity to learn from each other in order to better understand the other's perspective. One example is where a female lawyer mentee is paired with a male partner mentor and by having to 'step into her shoes' for a day, he was able to better appreciate the challenges of balancing work and career responsibilities at home.

As a result of some of the perspectives, the firm had started a few years ago to implement agile working policies which were far reaching and well ahead of a number our peers, and this put us in good stead to deal with the COVID-9 pandemic when it arrived as we were already equipped to deal with a an agile workforce.

We also introduced online and coaching support for women and men who take parental leave to minimise the disruption that might cause to career progress, and men and women are supported through a Shared Parental Leave Policy.

In addition to gender, we have also established a number of employee networks to bring people together into communities to help them feel connected and respected and also to help the firm understand their perspective and bring them into the decision making for the firm and our clients. Some examples of these networks include FREE (Faith, Race, Ethnicity and Equality), Disability & Well Being and Family Support Networks.

The networks host a number of interesting events and programs, celebrating different faiths, ethnicity, and engaging with partner schools and organisations in order to increase accessibility to the legal profession for young people from diverse backgrounds. One example is the SUN programme which was rolled out in various offices. This was to identify the barriers to recruitment and career progression which may be faced by people due to their race, colour, or ethnicity. The aim of SUN is to create a better balance of race and ethnicity within our workforce and a better workplace for all.

Following a comprehensive consultation, we have developed a series of recommendations to be implemented across the firm, including Cultural Confidence training and a Cultural Competence programme, which focuses on upskilling people to better understand diversity elements across our global business. Additional actions include Mentoring, Role Models programmes, and an interesting short film called "Talk about race" to raise awareness across the firm.

Ultimately, the key to improving diversity and gender balance in any organisation is having accountable leaders and support from senior management. At Pinsent Masons, we consider the key to creating accountability is not about establishing quotas, but about creating a culture where managers know they will be challenged to justify their decisions based on diversity data. The more leaders know they will be challenged on this, the more they will be testing their own decisions and that of others and questioning their assumptions. This avoids lazy thinking and encourages managers to properly consider the full cohort rather than a select few which will ultimately lead to narrowing the diversity gap.