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Beware of statistics. Imagine a firm consisting of male sole practitioner with profits of £80,000 and one female secretary earning £20,000. Gender pay gap: 300%! I would hope that the reason for the gender pay gap in these big firms is not that males are paid more than females for the same job but that there are more male than female partners (ie. high earners) in those firms. The point is that you can't include all partners and employees in the same averaging exercise because the average is slewed by the very large amounts partners earn compared to employees. If, say, 65% of the partners are male that will give rise to a meaningless average pay gap across the firm. Of course, it begs the question of whether these firms should have more female partners but a meaningless average has no bearing on that question.