For most people, an office job means spending the majority of their waking hours sitting in one place surrounded by the same group of people. Undoubtedly, some of these people you would not have chosen to sit next to. Others you may get on with very well. Either way it has to be a hard choice to keep something as basic as your sexuality a secret from people you spend such a large proportion of your life with.

Although the legal profession provides countless examples of impressive deal-doers and business leaders for up-and-coming lawyers to aspire to intellectually, it seems in some areas it lacks people to look up to on a personal basis.

As our feature this week discusses, there is only a handful of openly gay solicitors and barristers in senior positions to act as role models for those coming up through the ranks. So it is in this vein that leading gay charity Stonewall and a group of senior partners and barristers are calling for more homosexual lawyers to step forward and talk about their experiences of coming out.

In order for more gay lawyers to act as role models, they first need to be comfortable talking about their sexuality in the workplace – in fact Field Fisher Waterhouse managing partner Michael Chissick and Berwin Leighton Paisner banking partner Daisy Reeves argue in our feature that it behoves gay lawyers to come out.

The profession as a whole may have some way to go but no one can deny that the bigger law firms have come a long way over the past decade when it comes to diversity. However, to date this has largely been focused around issues relating to gender and race. Diversity in relation to sexual orientation has seemingly taken a bit of a back seat, driven more by cross-firm bodies such as InterLaw and other LGBT networking groups than by the firms themselves.

But while gender and particularly race diversity are interlinked with socio-economic diversity, sexual preference is a separate issue. This is not something firms can legislate for by recruiting from a wider pool of universities or being more flexible on working hours.

This doesn't mean that law firms are off the hook – much of the issue boils down to individual attitudes and the firm culture that they can affect. Coming out at work should be a personal choice not an obligation, but in an ideal world the deciding factor should not be how it will be received by colleagues and clients. So to make being gay a non-issue, first firms have to make it an issue.