Partners acknowledge impact of entrenched views on career hopes for female lawyers. Pui-Guan Man reports

More than half of partners regularly come across examples of outright sexism in the commercial legal sector, despite efforts made in the profession over the last 10 years to stamp it out. 

Legal Week's latest Big Question survey found that of 169 partners responding to the survey, 58% said they witnessed blatant sexism on a fairly regular basis, with 20% stating they come across it either 'often' or 'very often', and a further 38% 'sometimes' seeing it. 

While just over a third of respondents (35%) said they rarely encountered obvious sexism in the commercial legal sector, only 7% said they had never come across it in their career. 

The research found an even higher percentage of partners acknowledging more subtle examples of bias against female lawyers. Here, 38% said they either 'often' or 'very often' saw this, with the same percentage acknowledging it happened sometimes. Only 6% said they never came across it, with the remainder acknowledging rare occurrences. 

Ashurst senior partner Charlie Geffen said: "Sexism has undoubtedly contributed to the unacceptably low level of senior women in business historically. Although less of a problem now, unconscious sexism or bias clearly continues to have an adverse impact."

Despite these findings, 75% of respondents said the legal profession has improved at eradicating sexism and equally engaging women compared with 10 years ago, with increasing numbers of firms looking to grow the number of women both making partner and holding management roles in recent years. Around 22% of respondents said there had been no real changes, with the remaining 4% believing the situation had deteriorated.

Geffen added: "Firms are getting better at identifying the issues openly and addressing them, which is a big step forward. But the real challenge now is to speed up the rate of change – while things are going in the right direction, it's embarrassingly slow at present."

Trowers & Hamlins corporate partner and incoming senior partner Jennie Gubbins said: "Over the years the face of law has changed and there are more women practising and indeed reaching partnership. It's possible that lawyers have the perception that senior partners should be male, if that's something they've seen consistently throughout their career. It's important for people to see more women in leadership positions in a law firm as this will change perceptions."

Nearly three-quarters (73%) of partners believe large law firms need to increase their percentage of female partners, which in many firms stands at just 15%-20%, with 22% describing the current balance as "embarrassing". In contrast, 13% dismissed complaints about the issue as irrelevant, with a further 14% professing to have no strong feelings. 

Reed Smith head of structured finance Tamara Box said: "Law firms are actively driving gender initiatives forward but we're still not making much progress. The 50%-60% of female graduates that start at a firm seem to get lost as we look to the top, to partners. They clearly don't get stupid half way through their careers, so we need to look at what we need to do differently, not necessarily what they need to do differently."

When comparing attitudes at law firms with other professional services firms, 44% said the legal sector is better than other sectors, with 36% believing it to be broadly the same and 20% thinking it is worse. 

Olswang chief executive David Stewart said: "Law firms need to recognise what larger professional services businesses worldwide have already concluded: that it is not good for business to have such a small proportion of women in our senior ranks, and that the hard yards of better promotion processes, unconscious bias training, creating appropriate targets so goals are explicit and clear, and creating clear policies around flexible working all need to be implemented as part of a thoughtful, long-term commitment to better gender diversity."

Partners on sexism

- 75% believe the profession has made progress stamping out sexism over the last decade
- 58% regularly come across examples of outright sexism in the legal sector
- 73% think firms need to do better on female representation among partnerships
- 38% often or very often come across subtle examples of bias against female lawyers
- 22% are embarrassed by the poor representation of women making partner
- 7% say they never come across outright sexism