Role models matter as profession struggles to embrace diversity

Research for The Lawyer’s forthcoming Diversity Report, which is published on Monday 16 November, has revealed that there has been absolutely no movement in the proportion of female partners at the top 200 UK firms over the past five years, while senior lawyers are still shying away from revealing things like their educational background or sexual orientation.

Why is this the case? On the female front, junior lawyers still don’t see enough role models in senior positions to stop them taking themselves off the partnership track. The ones they do see are so few and far between that their successes are seen as unattainable, meaning all the work firms have done around mentoring and networking has largely gone to waste.

A recent report found that fully a third of young female lawyers had lost interest in progressing to senior management and only 23 per cent thought there were good role models in their firms.

For the other strands of diversity there are no role models because partners are still afraid that if they come out as bisexual or bipolar it will hamper their chances of winning work. The knock-on effect is that those coming into the profession see no one like them in the upper levels, leading many to conclude that partnership just isn’t for them.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to blame the victims for their continuing state of victimhood. The law has been the preserve of privately educated straight white men for so long that it is only natural they would favour their kin when deciding who to welcome into the fold.

But in that sense they are victims too: by unconsciously being drawn to those with the same backgrounds and tastes as them, these straight white males are denying themselves access to the widest possible pool of talent and ultimately it is their businesses that will suffer.

Unconscious-bias training, which is being rolled out across the profession with gusto, is designed to tackle this and firms have also upped the ante when it comes to diverse hiring at the junior end. The problem is that unless partnerships can change radically those diverse candidates are not likely to make it to the top, and so the cycle continues.

The answer is an elusive one, but as diversity breeds diversity female partner targets are a first positive step towards creating partnerships that are more representative of the communities they operate in and the clients they serve. There’s nothing to say these women won’t be straight, white and privately educated too, but their experience of being part of a minority group could prove pivotal for opening up partnerships to other minority groups.

A second positive step would be for existing partners whose diverse characteristics are not visible to come out to those around them. Not only are strong diverse role models desperately needed but, as gay rights charity Stonewall says, people perform better when they can be themselves.

Diversity matters and here’s why: if firms think they’re doing well now, think how amazing they could be if they weren’t only hiring and promoting from the absolute widest pool of talent, but their existing talent was performing to its utmost too.