A top 40 U.K. firm has reported that its partner pay gap favoured women last year for the first time in its 242-year history.

Trowers & Hamlins, which employs more than 700 people across offices in the U.K., Middle East and Far East, has said that mean pay for its female partners was 0.8 percent higher than the figure for men in the 12 months to April 2018. Female partners make up 40 percent of the firm's partnership.

Law firms have begun to include partners in their gender pay gap reporting in the past year as part of a wider push to increase transparency in the sector.

Trowers included partnership data as part of its firm-wide gender pay gap numbers for the year to April 2017.

This is the first year the firm has provided a figure focused only on the partners. But the firm calculated that the previous year would have measured a 9 percent gap in favour of its male partners, and the firm said this was the first time female partners have outstripped men.

This year the firm has combined them, which explains the increase in the overall gender pay gap from 18.1% to 25.5%.

Across fee-earners below partner level, the firm has narrowed the bias towards men from 4.2 percent to 2.5 percent and in the London office the mean gender pay gap is 1.5 percent in favour of female employees.

The firm's senior partner Jennie Gubbins commented: "We are proud to announce a very low gender pay gap across our partnership, which is great in a sector that can struggle to retain female talent at senior levels."

Trowers traces its roots back to 1777. It became known as Trowers & Hamlins in 1987.

Last year, Hogan Lovells reported a UK gender pay gap that favoured its female partners by 3 percent and also showed no pay gap among its non-partner lawyers.