Hardware failure

Do days of awareness and celebration work? Not always – Jazz Awareness Day comes at the end of National Pet Month (April), and probably won’t find me playing Gershwin’s Walking the Dog, volume up high, windows flung open. 

But International Women’s Day has rightly sustained its place as an important occasion in the legal profession’s calendar. That is for two reasons. First, role models are important. And with women under-represented in leadership positions in the legal profession, highlighting the achievements of those who attain those positions is important. Often, their own feedback is that the visibility of role models mattered on their way to the top.

Second, it is a prompt to ask questions about why, in a profession whose intake is majority women, their chances of progression, especially in law firms where the financial rewards are highest, remain lower than for their male counterparts. It is a complex problem in search of a solution, and as such naturally attracts curious legal minds.

Many, me included, suspect that while the profession’s equality ‘software’ – taking in ambition, language, celebration, mentoring, unconscious bias training and handwringing – look promising, it is not compatible with law’s ‘hardware’.

As Maria Shahid relates in this week’s cover story, based as it is in a society where women bear the dominant burden for caring responsibilities, the software doesn’t work with the hardware – inflexible billing targets, presenteeism, and a professional structure that copes poorly with career breaks, and does not much talk about the menopause. The 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act opened the door to a legal world designed for and by men, and despite improvements, it has been insufficiently adapted since.

A hardware upgrade for the profession is all the more urgent given a rise in importance, and rewards, for legal technologists – the tech pipeline being heavily male from the ground floor up.

I do not think one should have to make a business case for equality. But the business case is undeniably there. The 2001 Kingsmill Review, commissioned by what was then the Department of Trade and Industry, put it rather well. Using the language of previous corporate governance reports, Denise Kingsmill framed the benefits of equality in progression in terms of ‘minimising risk’ and ‘enhancing returns’.