Almost 70% of employees in the legal profession are female, but don’t expect anything like that figure when it comes to the sector’s top management positions. And don’t even think for a minute that women working in the profession would be earning anything like their male counterparts.
According to data released by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency this week, the Australian legal sector is doing particularly poorly when it comes to workplace gender equality. And it’s especially true when it comes to pay, with women working full-time in law earning an average 35.6% less than their male counterparts.
Sixty six legal organisations reported to WGEA, covering a total of 28,109 employees. It’s clear the legal profession has long had a problem when it comes to the still too few number of women in partnerships, but never before has the true imbalance of the profession’s gender composition been so evident.
WGEA found women make up just 6.5% of ‘CEO/Head of business’ positions in the legal sector (compared with a total average of 17.3%). This is despite the fact that women hold 36.3% of the next layer down of management positions and 30.6% of ‘general manager’positions — both higher than the average across all industries, at 26.1% and 27.8% respectively.
Go two more management layers down and women appear to be doing particularly well — holding 44.9% of ‘senior manager’ positions and 60.2% of ‘other manager’ positions.
But something is clearly going wrong on the way to the very top.
Meanwhile, something is seriously askew with pay and it’s not something that can be blamed on ‘women not negotiating for bonuses’ alone. The total remuneration gap is 35.6%, just slightly under the 35.8% base remuneration gap. (The pay analysis does not include equity partner remuneration.)
In recent weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing some of the country’s most powerful women in the legal profession, including the now-former Henry Davis York managing partner Sharon Cook and Maddocks CEO Michelle Dixon.
What struck me about both these women is that their passion for pushing gender equality in the profession underpins so much of their management priorities.
For Dixon, that included asking the partnership to vote on a quota system for the law firm’s partner-elected board positions as one of her first acts as CEO. For Cook, it meant spending her final months with the firm speaking with staff and running seminars on gender-based issues to help ensure the work she’d put in wouldn’t be lost when she left.
Both Dixon and Cook are two of just a tiny number of women to have lead, or are leading, the country’s top 20 law firms. Also on that list is King & Wood managing partner Sue Kench. They are all regularly called upon to discuss gender equality in the legal profession and appear more than willing to lend plenty of time to the issues.
And they’re all continually asking, ‘where are the women?’ when it comes to the very pointy end of management.
This is because the women shouldn’t be hard to find. Women have been graduating from law in equal numbers to men since the 1980s. Both Dixon and Cook certainly don’t recall being exceptions to the norm while studying. And now, as the WGEA data shows, women are not necessarily getting stuck in the ‘pipeline’ on the way to management — but rather on the step from senior management to the CEO level.
Women dominate the profession. Yet the ‘boys club’ still dominates who influences the profession.
Unlike fields like technology and engineering, we don’t need to encourage more women to study law. But it does make you wonder, why are so many pursuing a sector that still so heavily favours men?