Supporting Future Female Talent in Law - New Survey and Insights

Abstract

Despite the often high levels of women joining law firms, which in some firms represents a majority of the total early career intake, we also know that by mid-career and certainly by the time people are looking for promotion into the partnership, the number of women falls significantly. According to the recent report in the Law Gazette (April 2024) called “Touching the void” the gender gap remains large and although progress has been made it has been slow. The same article quotes figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority, that while 60% of solicitors are women, there is still a significant seniority gap, which has narrowed only slightly since 2015: 47% of salaried partners and 32% of full equity partners are women.

Whilst there have been some positive changes and initiatives to encourage and support women, the pace of change has been slow and research conducted by Obelisk Support and Gapsquare in April 2022, estimated that at the current rate of change it would take 86 years to close the mean gender pay gap and 40.6 years to close the median.

Aside from what the data shows, there have also been helpful articles that bring to life the practical aspects for women of balancing a career and client demands in law with home-life demands as was illustrated by the article by Megan Gray “Lawyer, Mother and the Dark Night of the Soul: What We Are Doing to Women at Law Firms”, where she provided a personal view on the practical aspects of being a new mum in a major law firm.

New Insights Needed

Companiions.com and partner organisation The Tall Wall (winner of Women & Diversity in Law award, Supplier of the Year), wanted to explore further the challenges for women in law and ask the same community of women for their own suggestions as to what would help support them and encourage them to stay in the profession, focusing more on the practical help they need. By supporting female talent more actively, the logic goes that fewer women will drop out of the profession mid-career and so result in a much stronger and wider female talent pipeline mid-career and on into partnership.  Reducing the “drop out” rate will also help to accelerate the pace of change in female representation in partnership more quickly than would otherwise be the case.

With the next Gender Pay gap reports due in April 2025 and International Women’s Day on March 8th, we thought this was an opportune time to re-examine this issue.  Transparency is a good thing but, as per the Gender Pay Bot which ran on International Women’s Day (IWD) in 2022, it has resulted in some #awkward messaging, re-tweeting gender pay data alongside the actual posts made by firms on IWD.

In the gender pay reports posted by firms in previous years, many have chosen to focus on explaining the figures (as mentioned also in the Law Gazette article) and we see much of the same initiatives from prior years highlighted again. Since the first reports in 2017, there is now data for 7 years and whilst the mantra of “change takes time”, which is certainly true, the more years pass, the more the spotlight will be on law firms to try new things if the current initiatives are not “moving the dial” quickly enough. 

We wanted to know if there are any new actions that firms can take. This could not only help firms to target their help more effectively, but also provide opportunities to highlight any new and additional steps they are taking in the next gender pay report to improve the pace of change. We thought that the best place to start is to ask women in law which is what we decided to do.

Our Survey

The survey was sent to female lawyers to understand not just about some of the challenges they face, as we thought that this was well understood and already written about (as per the various articles mentioned above), but also to ask them more about the practical things that law firms could do to support them and their career.

We decided to focus our survey on female Associates as mid-career lawyers, some of whom aspire to have a long term career in law and partnership, where there remains a significant and almost equal pool of female lawyers. It is also a demographic where life changes are likely to be taking place and women may naturally be assessing their commitment to law and what they need from firms to support them.

The survey was focused on UK based Associates only and was carried out by companiions.com with support from our partner organisation The Tall Wall. We contacted 1,200 Associate level lawyers in mid to large sized firms to ensure that there were enough Associates in that firm’s questionnaire pool to ensure individual anonymity, as we wanted Associates in this survey to feel free to give their honest assessment and feedback.

Respondents received no payment or other compensation for their responses and were told that these would be anonymous. They were told that companiions who commissioned the survey would make a donation to LawCare, the mental health charity for the profession based on the number of respondents.

Results and Analysis

The major findings were as follows:

Outside commitments are impacting work 74% of respondents said that personal responsibilities (childcare, eldercare, other home or family commitments were impacting work-life balance. Only 4% said that this was never the case.

This high score was not a surprise to us given the demanding nature of client work and the long hours that can be required in law.  According to LegalCheek, which publishes a “Most List”, there are 23 firms with average finish time beyond 8:30pm and three reporting finish times of beyond 10pm. If you combine this with recent findings in the “Mind the caring gap” joint report from Next100 Years with LawCare they note that “it’s clear that women are overwhelmingly taking on caring responsibilities, regardless of the situation (childcare, eldercare etc)”.

The current set-up is not working for themIn considering the support they need to balance home and work demands, 65% said that the current set-up does “not support at all” or only “somewhat” their needs. There is also a significant 22% who are neutral i.e. don’t feel strongly one way or another, showing a degree of apathy and may suggest that our audience is skeptical of the effectiveness of existing steps. 

Outside of our survey results, there is other evidence that firms are not doing enough to support women. The Tall Wall, who supports many women in the sector, hears first-hand during coaching sessions what support women are seeking. Helen Cowan, Founder and CEO of The Tall Wall noted that “only 21% of women (versus 48% of men) reported that they understand the expectations of being a partner and considering the needs of parenthood/caring responsibilities, this makes it much less likely for aspiring women to step into the unknown”. One recent comment from one of The Tall Wall’s clients illustrates the practicalities of how difficult it is to balance things when they said “I don’t see how I can make this work with my family and everything else going on at home. I am already almost at breaking point".  Women feel even more need to be 100% ready for partnership than men. In other data from The Tall Wall, 57% of women versus only 20% of men reported “I’ve outgrown my current job description”. This confirms what we anecdotally know about women being willing to move up only when they feel completely comfortable in their current role.

So what type of support are people looking for from firms? The highest demand was for more flexible hours (87%), followed equally by better Childcare support (43%) and also on demand concierge for at-home errands (43%). Also listed was mental health support (35%). Eldercare was cited by 9%, which given the age and demographic of our survey audience (mid-career), this might be expected to be a lesser figure than childcare.

It is interesting that at-home concierge services are considered as just as important as childcare because it shows that there are either a significant number of women without children who also want support, or that firms offering childcare support only does not provide enough support to women who may be juggling many other at home responsibilities as well. Clearly this result shows that we must be careful not to characterise practical support for women as being just about childcare.

It is not surprising that mental health features highly as this mirrors recent research in April 2024 by Telus Health, the Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) provider, who regularly publish a mental health index (MHI) for the UK. They show that:

• Women are 40 per cent more likely than men to feel extremely burnt out and;

• Workers under 40 are nearly three times more likely than workers over 50 to feel extremely burnt out (our audience is likely to be in this demographic) and;

• Nearly one-third (30 per cent) feel burnt out because they have too much work to do within working hours, 19 per cent have too many personal demands

When asking the Associates about the implications of the above, a massive 91% of respondents told us that the provision of on-demand services in the areas above would improve their ability to focus and be productive at work.

In a regulated environment such as law, where not only client service, but accuracy is paramount, the message around focus (given the demanding hours worked) is one to watch and take note. Although not easy to measure or track in aggregate, our respondents clearly point to challenges in focus caused by trying to balance work and home demands.

What other implications are there for law firms staying with the status quo?

In our final question we asked: “If your employer provided additional at-home / work support services, to what extent would this influence you wanting to stay at the firm over the long-term”. In our survey 82% of respondents said that it would either be very likely or likely to influence their decision. This strong response suggests that this could be one of the most likely areas to affect and reduce drop-off of mid-career female talent.

With a strong war on talent taking place in the sector, especially post-qualified, investing in this area could help firms differentiate themselves to either retain their best female talent, or attract new talent to the firm and increase the talent pipeline longer-term for the partnership.

For women considering a return to work from maternity leave the signals are even clearer and there is a real desire for firms to do much more. Recent data from The Tall Wall showed that 57% of women wanted their employer to simply be more proactive in asking them what would make their return a success.

Conclusions

In summary, this survey shows that there is much more to be done to support women, especially in the provision of practical support (at-home, flexible hours etc.) and without this, gender equality will be very unlikely to see the step change that many firms are seeking. 

Claire McCusker, Principal Strategic consultant at Aon, a leading global professional services firm, said that "We're in a workplace transition where more women are attaining more senior leadership positions. We understand employers are faced with the challenge in finding the balance between offering employees flexibility to manage their lives around work, while still demanding performance and productivity - companiions is an Aon provider enabling organisations to address this challenge".

Not only is it the right thing to do to support female talent in law, but introducing better support (particularly on-demand services to support women’s commitments outside work) can make sound financial sense too. As partnerships compete for female talent and given the billable hours business model, any absenteeism or burn-out due to the pressures in balancing home-clients-firm commitments (some of which are unplanned events), will also have a knock-on financial impact to the firm, as well as its people and client experience.

It is also important to think outside of the legal sector, because talented women increasingly have choices in a range of other careers and options outside of law.  It is not just about being the better law firm, but you are competing for early talent with non-law sectors too. For women deciding whether or not to start a career in law, how they see law firms compared to other sectors is increasingly important. A recent data set compiled by LinkedIn noted that 56% of Gen Z women say they would not accept a role at a company that didn’t have diverse senior leadership. 

The steps such as women networks, changes to partnership selection process and training, childcare support etc. are of course positive, but they are clearly not seen as “moving the dial” enough. There is more to do and the status quo will not be sufficient to retain female talent.

So what are the steps that law firms should consider in light of this latest data.

• Review your at-home services and benefits to ensure that they cover a wider range of needs other than just childcare

• If you have a concierge service already, look at how well this caters for services delivered at home wherever your people live in the UK (not just around the locality of the office), and out of hours cover (weekends etc.).
  

• Generally provide more openness, support and structure around partnership. Making clearer the expectations as well as how the firm can directly support women with services and practical help to balance both aspects is key.
  

• Don’t just provide mentoring. Provide active sponsorship of individuals and be pro-active with conversations to bring women through the talent pipeline. Where possible, augment this with external coaching, especially for diverse talent at Associate level (66% of all respondents wanted coaching to help them prepare for the partnership process), and even more so for individuals going on parental leave to maintain that vital link and not lose people before they return.  

• Maternity leave for women is often seen as career limiting. Women are unclear on how they can practically balance being a parent with a career in a senior law position, especially when they return.  Offer and encourage Shared Parental Leave, if not already.
  

• Look at what other sectors are doing (don’t just limit your perspective to the law sector). Consider in particular what other professional services firms are doing.
  

• Lastly, act with speed and be seen to treat this as a priority so that you have an action plan and communicate the fact you are taking on board feedback to this audience, so they know you are taking on board this feedback.  Ideally, have a plan and services that you plan to offer, ready for April 2025.

About companiions

Companiions is a next generation, on-demand service to support employees with a range of different services to help them manage and balance their work and home demands. By offering this service, employers can not only help attract and retain talent, but in many cases the service can pay for itself through reduced absenteeism.

About The Tall Wall 

The Tall Wall is a specialist and award-winning (Women & Diversity in Law, Supplier of the Year) coaching company, supporting law firms and other professional services to create the conditions for all talent to thrive. With a specialism in executive and parental coaching for diverse talent, The Tall Wall has worked with more than a thousand lawyers across 18 law firms.  Coaching is one of the most effective and enduring ways to activate the value contribution of employees - and to liberate the human and economic potential latent within the workforce.

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