Stop the canapés and build gender-balanced law firms

Totally gender fatigued is how I would summarise the legal profession. The sector as a whole seems mildly exhausted by the gender topic, especially in the UK or US. They feel like they’ve tried everything and nothing has worked.

At the recent IBA World Women Lawyers’ conference in London, the lack ?of enthusiasm from the chairmen of leading international law firms was palpable. Yet, as the recent fuss about Latham & Watkins’ women’s network canapé-creating activities underlines, perhaps the approach taken simply hasn’t been effective. Maybe getting women together making canapés isn’t the most effective way to balance your business.

Few sectors have seen their ?gender balance shift quite as quickly ?and definitively as the legal one. The ?usual gender balance of most law ?firms’ graduate recruitment intake is ?around 60 per cent female. This accurately reflects the reality of law ?school demographics.

Law firms are finding that a lot of their clients are changing too, as the number of women in corporate legal departments continues to rise (fuelled, in no small measure, by the flood of women leaving law firms).

Yet the partnership profiles of most large firms are having trouble keeping pace. They are still working very hard to get beyond an 85/15 gender balance in favour of men. The best are achieving an 80/20 split. And that’s not usually looking at equity partners, where the dominance of men rises still further.

These firms recruit more and more women, but they simply don’t stay. Indeed, they are leaving earlier and earlier: they get a whiff of reality and run.
So the firms conclude that women simply aren’t interested, motivated or ?ready to work hard. And the efforts and initiatives they put in place to remedy the issue are redolent of this basic analysis.

Law firms are still box-ticking with fix-the-women strategies that have proven ineffective in the corporate world. Women’s networks, mentoring and assertiveness training for women are all the rage. Latham is not doing anything different, just less well. Repeating what doesn’t work elsewhere is not a convincing replacement for effectiveness.

Law firms, cornered between the increasing demands and time pressures of their clients and the productivity of their competitors, don’t feel they have the breathing space to question the model, culture and mindsets that seems to eliminate the majority of the talent in their sector today.

Gender balance has a lot less to do with culture than it does with the person running the office. In a partnership, it is very hard to put pressure on a man in a distant country to shape up on gender.
Yet, if law firms want to survive and prosper in a century where both their ?talent pools and their customer profiles ?are changing fast, they may need to.

Improving diversity

There are three things that firms should consider – and fast.?

1. Frame gender as a business issue: align all your people and office heads on why this issue matters for your business. They still don’t buy it and you can’t make progress until they do.?

2. Focus on the majority, not the minority: put the accountability for gender balancing on team and office leaders, not solely on the women failing to make partner.?

3. Stop fixing women and start ?making everyone gender bilingual: stop the programmes focused on women (which serves to marginalise them even more) and equip all staff with the skills and competencies to retain and develop talent and customers across both genders.?

Monica Burch, senior partner at Addleshaw Goddard, argued with me when I suggested dropping all internal women’s networks. “In environments that are so male dominated, bringing women together is helpful, they need a bit of relief.”

Chris Saul, senior partner at Slaughter and May, agreed with her. “Women find them very useful,” he said, “since the familial burden falls on women, women’s networks help with that.”

These comments unknowingly reflect the real issue. If the culture is so difficult for women that they need to group together to get some air, they are unlikely to survive, let alone prosper. It is also unlikely that law firms will get the best ?out of them.

If leaders continue to suggest ?that women bear the brunt of families, instead of creating modern workplaces that acknowledge that men would love ?to be allowed to share in those ‘burdens’, they are also unlikely to retain the ?best and smartest young parents of ?either gender.

It’s a waste of time and money to throw band-aids at women to make them feel better in an unfriendly culture. Over time and lack of progress, it will hurt your firm’s reputation more than help it.

Instead, save some money: cut the canapés for women. Just get your ?partners serious about diversity.
Make gender balance on teams a criteria for partner promotion or for ?being office head. That’s cheap, and ?much more effective.