Since the Law Society appointed its first president in 1841, the first 5 were girls. Ensuring the following 169 are girl attorneys, Christina Blacklaws shows mischievously, might even the score. As the 174th president of the enterprise that represents solicitors in England and Wales, the distinguished family legal professional has made the motive of enhancing gender stability within the male-dominated legal profession one of her priorities.
Since 2014, more than 60% of the latest solicitors each year have been women, but only 50.2% of working solicitors in England and Wales are female. In law corporations, simply 30. Eight percent of partners are girls. In the United Kingdom’s supreme courtroom, a quarter of judges may also now be female, but girls make up the smallest 15.8% of QCs. The figures reveal that senior positions in the legal profession are nonetheless occupied overwhelmingly by men. The alternate tempo is languid – no matter tons being accomplished by using law firms to make flexible running and childcare more widely available.
Blacklaws commissioned a chain of roundtable conferences, surveys, and certain reports, which confirmed that subconscious bias in recruitment and work allocation turned into the maximum widely identified barrier to equality, followed by unacceptable work-life balances. That accords with recent research by way of the American Bar Association, which shows that women are leaving in their past due 40s and 50s because they’ve had enough. Many are quitting just at the time when they are maximum treasured to their companies. That can’t be good commercial enterprise practice.
“The loss of career development isn’t handy [due to the absence of] childcare,” Blacklaws observes. “In some of the bigger regulation companies, the percentage of girls in equity partnerships is only 11% or 12%. These are sticky figures. Not converting. It’s deplorable, and it’s a sizeable fear. There have to be more ladies than guys [given the profession’s intake]. It’s just bad for the enterprise.”
In City regulation companies, she feedback, a professional’s an accomplice lasts on average 15 years earlier than “burnout.” There is a “lengthy-hours way of life.” Respondents to the Law Society’s survey also diagnosed the “masculine form of the law” as a massive disincentive for many women. “Drinking inside the bar and the whole lot around sports activities inside the nighttime,” Blacklaws explains. And loads of girls admitted they best reached senior positions with the aid of turning into “men-fashioned women” – putting in the hours, ingesting, playing golf, or enduring past due working nights.
“It takes loads of undoing to think and act otherwise; otherwise, we revert to running an old bias, which does lead to discrimination,” says Blacklaws. “So it’s critical that there are such things as education and profession champions whose process is to keep [the issue] alive, especially while it’s approximately recruitment and remuneration.”
“We want men to step up and take responsibility,” she provides. “They are a key part of the solution.” Yet 100 years after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act subsequently eliminated regulations on girls getting into the professions or keeping civil posts, there may be little common ground among the sexes on redressing gender inequality: 74 % of men surveyed said there had been appropriate development, whilst simplest forty-eight % of girls agreed.
The act obtained royal assent on 23 December 1919; every week later, Ada Summers, mayor of Stalybridge, became the first girl justice of the peace. The following year in Glasgow, Madge Easton Anderson became the first lady admitted as a solicitor. Blacklaws believes that having extra girl judges – and especially more senior judges, including Lady Hale, who is president of the ultimate court – could start to change the character of the law.
