Moving the Gender Equality Needle

Apart from what else your company can do to encourage gender equality? After the International Women’s Day, there is a strong call to action for speeding up gender equality: law firms that drive transformational changes are more effective and perform better. This article will describe five things your organisation can do to build an equal and inclusive workplace.

For example, while women have made up 60% of new entrants into the solicitors’ profession since 1990 and were the majority among practising solicitors as at 2017, only 28% of partners in private practise are women according to The Law Society. According to a study by The Times in 2019, compared with the national average pay gap of 9.6%, which have found that female staff in the ten largest law firms that together generated about £14 billion in revenue last year are paid 43% less than their male colleagues.’ Here are some steps you could take.

Narrowing down the wage difference between men and women

Despite having been required by the Equality Act of 2010 to pay equal amounts for similar work, bonus or merit-based pays may still disadvantage women. So, be transparent about employee salaries within your organisation and avoid excluding senior-most well-paid lawyers. Additionally, you can specify targets based on number or proportion of partnerships held by females; besides this,pay attention when formulating performance criteria so that compensation should not reflect any bias towards individuals.

Unconscious bias needs to be addressed

Unconscious biases refer to automatic mental processes making use of implicit associations using stereotypes learned from early experiences including young boys drawing pictures depicting pilots, firefighters as males. This affects employment decisions like recruitment, promotion and task allocation made by corporations. Your employees can get unconscious bias training that helps them identify bias while offering practical skills and vocabulary for fighting bias across the institution. Other strategies include appointments of diversity and inclusion champions plus gender-blind recruitment.

Companies should genuinely embrace flexible working.

When all companies embrace flexible working at all levels, it can lead to increased employee retention and satisfaction. It can also be a powerful message when leading partners in the firm participate in practices that are friendly towards family responsibilities. When you allow your team members to work from wherever they want and whenever they want, you will be addressing the problem where women’s lives are restricted by virtue of being parents. Young lawyers especially millennials, require better work life balance and this is what firms must respond to if they have any intentions of retaining talent.

Enroll in mentoring, networking or sponsorship programs

For instance, mentoring can be extremely beneficial for young barristers as they seek to develop and achieve their ambitions particularly with House Counsel who do not have the same resources at their disposal as those in law firms. Think about reverse mentoring whereby a junior teammate shares with superior colleagues his experience thereby introducing some novelty into the workplace while doing away with both ageism and sexism. Likewise your business may become part of or establish local/regional/networking Lean In circles.

Women deserve to be celebrated for their successes

Make your successful women more visible i.e., whether on the bench, company boardroom,she is an industry leader or just comes form your customer base, to celebrate female talent and make it known

It is the duty of all of us to confront prejudice and promote growth in relation to every aspect like sex, origin and racial discrimination among others, which will enable us create a more equitable legal practice and nation at large.