Start by wearing the trousers

There were laughs all round last month when some senior female lawyers gathered to celebrate the legal profession’s  progress towards gender equality over the last three decades. 

The reason for the laughter? An article in a 1995 article in The Lawyer with the headline: “Are the Ladies Hemmed In”, exploring Linklaters’ controversial decision to allow women to wear trousers in the office. Defending the change in policy, one associate pronounced

“Working in a male-dominated field, it is better for the client if they forget you are a woman.”

Head of Personnel

So there you are. Back in the day, progress for women meant going in disguise.

The Real Impact of a Male Dominated Field

Laughs aside, the panel talked very honestly about what it was like to work in a law firm in the late nineties and early 2000s. Maternity leave was minimal and there was almost an expectation that many women would leave once they started a family. Business development activities revolved around the pub, lunching, rugby and cricket. The women who did survive – and who went on to thrive – did so by fitting in with the organisation, emulating the men around them. Trousers were just the start of it.

A Slow Awakening

Whilst it’s fair to say that the pace of change was quite slow, law firms did eventually begin to wake up to the fact that gender equality in their senior ranks was somewhat of a problem. As society more generally began to talk about matters of equality and diversity, so the law as a profession began to take note.

After years of pushing diversity from a moral perspective, when McKinsey presented data to show that it’s also good for business, law firms finally developed programmes to retain and advance female lawyers.

A raft of initiatives was borne to try and address the issues, buoyed on by the fact that an increasing proportion of new graduates were female.  Firms began to ask women for their opinions, to set up mentoring schemes and to actively put in place programmes and actions that would make things better for women.

This time, though, women were “wearing the trousers” metapohrically, asking for the firms to adapt to accommodate their situation, rather than the other way round.

What Gets Measured Gets Done

However, actions without clear targets rarely deliver meaningful results. There was a plethora of words and initiatives for a good seven to eight years the pace of change really began to accelerate.

Scrutiny of law firm performance on diversity by clients led many firms to set clear and visible targets.  Transparency and healthy competition combined to up the ante. As the legal press also began to measure, track and report diversity measures, so performance began to improve across most areas.

Accelerating the Pace of Change

Over recent years, a number of different approaches have delivered improvements across the board.  The panel discussed five themes in particular:

• Sponsorship: Beyond mentoring: Firms like Freshfields introduced national or, at times, global sponsorship programmes. Such programmes connected women with senior leaders who would actively support their progression, providing them with opportunities to build out their networks and ensure they had the chance to work for important clients and be involved in business development.
• Organisational Change: Rather than expecting women to adapt to the organisation, firms themselves changed to be more accommodating of women, introducing vastly enhanced maternity leave policies, for example. There was no longer an expectation that women would simply leave after having children and serious efforts made to ensure they did not.
• Client Demand: Clients, too, played their part, continuing to demand that their law firms were more reflective of society. In 2019, over 170 GCs famously penned an open letter to law firms insisting that their law firm partners do better on all aspects of diversity, including race, gender, FTSE 100 GCs coming together to create General Counsel for Diversity & Inclusion (GC D&I). What better motivation than the threat of being removed from a prestigious client’s panel?
• Women in Power: Recent years have seen more women promoted into senior and managing partner positions, such as Georgia Dawson at Freshfields and Wheatley MacNamara at Simpson Thacher.  Women are heading significant practice groups and women partners are setting up and driving the activities of women’s networks such as the Breaking Barriers network at Hogan Lovells. Their influence ensures that business development is no longer all about sport and drinking!
• Non-linear careers: Firms are waking up to the fact that, for many women, careers don’t always go in straight lines. Whilst some do leave the law for a time, they also do often want to return and are perfectly capable of relaunchig their legal career.  Over the last five years the Reignite Academy has placed almost 100 women and has shone a light on this important pool of untapped potential.

2020s – The Pandemic & Parenting

Ironically, the most seismic change in law firms came not through any self directed initiative but through the response to an unavoidable global catastrophe. If there was one positive thing to come out of the pandemic it has to be the rapid acceptance of remote working.

The ability to work flexibly, to join meetings online, to avoid unnecessary business travel, made a massive difference to women in particular. And whilst there is a recognition that meeting face to face and working together in an office environment for at least part of the time are both essential, the panel shared a universal hope that law firms retain many of the benefits of hybrid working.

And happily, since both men and women have enjoyed the opportunities that hybrid working has provided, to balance work and a personal life, perhaps this is one trend that will not be reversed any time soon.                 

 Parting Thoughts

The panel had some final pieces of advice for younger women in the room:

• Be brave, don’t wait to be asked, communicate, don’t assume people will know how ambitious you are and what you want
• Don’t get hung up on perfectionism
• Think about what you want in life, not just at work and don’t assume anything is impossible
• Have a network of people both inside and outside of work with whom you can communicate, especially when you feel as though you’re at a crossroads
• Be kind to yourself
• Persevere!

When things look tough, just remember: it’s not that long ago that having permission to wear trousers was a “thing!” Women in law have come a long way – and there is so much more ahead.