Pregnancy can lead to all kinds of discrimination in the workplace. So how can law firms become more enlightend when it comes to maternity rights? Jonathan Rayner investigates


Women solicitors have learnt the hard way that babies can do more than just ruin their night’s sleep. They can also do terminal damage to their careers.



Many law firms, it seems, remain in the dark ages where maternity is concerned. Any woman, the logic goes, who values propagation above profits cannot truly be committed to the welfare of the partnership. And so she must be marginalised, then shown the door, subtly or otherwise.



Employment lawyers can give endless examples of women suffering discrimination in this way, but cannot name names because the cases usually settle before coming to court, with the claimants signing confidentiality agreements. Nonetheless, anonymous or otherwise, these women’s stories merit repeating.



Julie Morris, an employment partner at national firm Russell Jones & Walker (RJW), says she has handled a number of cases where women lawyers were made redundant while on maternity leave. ‘The partners had farmed out their clients to colleagues and then concluded [that the women lawyers] no longer had any value to the firm.’



On other occasions, Ms Morris continues, women solicitors returning from maternity leave have found that their clients were not returned to them. Instead, they were excluded from meetings and sidelined from larger transactions. Flexible or part-time working has often been refused, too, on the grounds that such an arrangement was unsuitable for a serious law firm.



Another RJW employment lawyer, Emma Hawksworth, adds that some women report that they are no longer respected as professionals from the moment they announce their pregnancy. She has also heard probably apocryphal tales of women lawyers sending emails from the labour ward in a doomed effort to save their jobs.



A woman lawyer who suffers disadvantage because she is pregnant or a mother has a good case for constructive dismissal and/or sex discrimination, which is why these cases tend to settle without the firm in question being exposed to adverse publicity. And according to Susha Chandrasekhar, chairwoman of the Association of Women Solicitors, a woman lawyer agreeing to remain silent about her treatment should come as no surprise, either. She says: ‘No woman lawyer dares go on record – the consequences are too frightening. She would be branded an activist or, heaven forbid, feminist – and would never get a job in the law again.’



Last month, however, names were published when Plymouth solicitor Susan Heale won her claim for sex discrimination against Thornleys Solicitors.



Exeter Employment Tribunal found the ‘financially unappealing’ offer of a salaried partnership to Ms Heale was made in the context of comments about how some firms do not hire women of child-bearing age, and found that various other events after she announced her pregnancy showed discrimination.


The tribunal also found Ms Heale, represented by south-west firm Foot Anstey, was unlawfully victimised after she raised concerns about her treatment, was constructively and unfairly dismissed on grounds of her pregnancy, and her employer failed to handle her grievance in accordance with the statutory minimum requirements.


Ms Heale had eventually resigned and become one of the 30,000 women who lose their jobs every year simply because they are pregnant, according to a 2005 report published by the Equal Opportunities Commission.



But how do so many law firms get themselves into trouble in this way? Joanna Wade of London firm Palmer Wade, a firm that specialises in employment discrimination cases, says: ‘Law firms should know better, of course, except all too often they are better at lawyering than employering. They fall foul of the rules because they don’t think straight around the issues of maternity. Their emotional assumption is that a woman cannot be both a mother and a committed member of the team.’



Ms Wade is optimistic, however, that the business case for retaining good women solicitors is increasingly making itself felt. There is also, she believes, a growing recognition among law firms that ‘family friendly’ policies can attract high-calibre candidates. ‘They are commercial drivers, important to the marketing strategy.’



But Ms Wade adds that the legal sector is disproportionately well represented among her clients because of its ‘24/7 workaholic tendencies’ and also because women solicitors know their rights and are ‘unafraid of the legal environment – they will sue if pushed’.



Of course, there are plenty of firms that demonstrate far more enlightened attitudes. Angharad Harris, for example, was made up to partner in the international corporate group of City firm Watson Farley & Williams when already seven months’ pregnant. And she knows other women lawyers within the firm who have been treated equally fairly.



Ms Harris says: ‘Firms such as mine have become increasingly understanding where maternity is concerned and increasingly receptive to flexible-working options. But the big question has to remain: does it work for the business? Heavy transactional work, for example, isn’t always practical where the lawyer is working part-time.’



She adds that flexibility is required from both sides. ‘People can be quite truculent when demanding their rights, but they should see both sides of the equation – you can’t really expect to be able to drop everything in mid-deal.’



A balanced approach to the issues around maternity – and indeed paternity – is advocated by the Association of Women Solicitors, which offers a confidential helpline staffed by volunteers who are also lawyers (call 0870 043 4844). Ms Chandrasekhar says the helpline gives each caller half-an-hour’s free legal advice, steering them in the right direction even before they tell people at work they are pregnant. It gives advice on maternity rights, on what questions to ask and on the challenges of returning to work after becoming a parent.



She adds that the helpline service has been extended to address paternity issues to emphasise the importance of the father’s role in raising children. ‘The new paternity provisions are still being consulted upon, but once parenthood means that the father – as well as the mother – could be away from the office for a protracted period, who knows how attitudes might change for the better?’



Changing attitudes for the better is the focus of Anna Kavanagh’s Time4Balance (T4B), a consultancy advising law firms on the feasibility of setting up flexible working arrangements for colleagues who have requested them.



Ms Kavanagh returned to work as a commercial property lawyer with a City firm after maternity leave, only to be told that she would not be permitted flexible working arrangements. She began proceedings represented by Palmer Wade, but settled before the case was heard – a familiar story.



The experience prompted her to set up T4B, which – put simply – analyses what someone actually does for a firm and decides, by finding the appropriate comparator, whether it could be done flexibly. It also helps the employer or senior partner to identify whether a particular individual is a suitable person to work flexibly, whether at home or as part of a job-share.



‘And T4B helps firms to address and overcome their fears around flexible working,’ says Ms Kavanagh. ‘One typical fear is the risk of a laptop computer crammed with confidential information being left on the train. Another is the problem of the rest of the team’s resentment that one individual is allowed to work flexibly, while they are stuck on the nine-to-five treadmill. There are ways around these problems and the benefits of staff attraction and retention far outweigh the effort needed.’



All of which sounds deceptively simple, but Ms Kavanagh says that some firms, flying in the face of reason, persist in making it difficult for individuals to work flexibly by taking away their best clients, and leaving them off meeting and email lists, and salary reviews.



She adds: ‘And it’s not just male partners. There is also the Queen Bee Syndrome, where an ambitious and successful female lawyer – who either has no children or ignores them – resents younger women asking for “special treatment”. Her attitude is that she’s had to bust a gut, so they can too.’



RJW employment solicitor Sam Mangwana, like her colleagues, has handled her share of cases concerning pregnancy and motherhood discrimination in the workplace. But she wonders whether demographics might solve the problem once and for all.



‘We’ve an ageing population and a growing pension crisis. The majority of new entrants to the profession nowadays are women and women have babies. Perhaps it’s time the government changed things so that we not only have the right to request flexible working – we also have the right to have it.’