Sasha Borissenko: Sigh, lawyers haven’t achieved gender equality

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There are numerous legal changes designed to make New Zealand more equitable for women. Photo / 123rf
THREE KEY FACTS
Sasha Borissenko is a freelance journalist who has reported extensively on the legal industry.
OPINION

The Law Society has been having a rough time recently, with complaints made
against current president Frazer Barton over advice he gave a church group about the destruction of children’s records.

However, the representative body’s pledge to even the gender score thankfully hasn’t dropped by the wayside, having released its third bi-annual Gender Equality Charter (GEC) survey last week.
For context, the Law Society created the GEC in 2018, which aimed to improve retention rates and the advancement of women lawyers. The introduction of the charter’s introduction coincided with serious allegations of sexual misconduct at Russell McVeagh, a year shy of the advent of the #metoo movement.
As of June last year, 158 legal workplaces were signatories to the GEC, which lists a set of commitments that are reported on via the survey. Of the signatories, 110 workplaces were eligible to contribute to the survey completed last year, and the response rate was 85%.
Although women make up 50.4% of New Zealand’s population, women are overrepresented among lawyers, at 55.4%. The overrepresentation buck stops there, sadly.
The 2018 survey reported 64% of senior legal roles were held by men. This figure hasn’t changed in five years. Recent survey results reveal women make up 34% of equity partner positions (up from 33% in 2021), 30% of directors (down from 47% in 2021), and 47% of salary-partnered positions (down from 50% in 2021).
You could argue those who make it through the glass ceiling struggle even then to have the profit-heavy piece of the pie.
To give you a better idea, Law Society Registry data ending June 30, 2024 shows 56.7% of barristers are men, 43.2% are women, and 0.1% are non-binary. Women make up the majority of employees (64%) and in-house lawyers (64.1%). In both contexts, 0.1% identify as non-binary. Women are seldom represented among sole practitioners (34.9%), compared to men at 65.1%.
Like the glimmer of hope that Covid-19 offered with the move away from working under a microscope to working from home, moves to increase unconscious bias training also appear to be going out the window. Training increased from 29% in 2018 to 64% in 2021.
It’s dropped to 54%, with 50% of respondents saying it was scheduled after the survey period. Twenty-five per cent said the training was only on offer for lawyers new to the workplace, and 20% said most staff had already been trained. The ol’ spray and walk away trick, as it were.
In other words, training exacerbates my cynicism (not dissimilar to my disdain for “organised” fun) when “change” includes “one-off” comic-sans-heavy PowerPoint sessions and/or other box-ticking exercises.
Free morning teas featuring savaloys and Kiwi onion dip are great for morale, sure, but they pale in significance compared to parental leave policies, gender pay audits, and quotas, for example.
Amazingly, last year’s survey asked whether workplaces had adopted the voluntary target (introduced in 2022) of making sure women lawyers received at least 50% of external instructions for significant matters.
Sadly, only 21% adopted the target, 49% had no clue whether their workplace had done so, and 30% said their workplaces gave it a hard no. For the 15 workplaces that were a hard yes, the average percentage achieved was 62%. Pity about the number of workplaces, though.
More on gender pay audits – the 2018 baseline survey revealed 35% of legal workplaces conducted audits. The rate increased to 62% of law firms in 2021, which remains unchanged. Only 39% of audited workplaces found pay equity reviews to be “very” or “quite” easy to do. Yet 63% found them to be worthwhile (6% said it wasn’t, saying it made little difference). Great in theory, hard in practice.
Nevertheless, 70% of workplaces reported having no gender pay gap in their organisation, or the question was moot (sole practitioners, for example). In 2021, the percentage was 52%.
Where gender pay gaps were found, 21% of workplaces considered gender equality during salary reviews, and 15% reviewed their policies and strategies.
Committing to the charter also means workplaces are encouraged to review areas such as recruitment, retention and promotion. Recruitment came out on top (77%), followed by retention and promotion (73%), and training and development (61%). Said reviews have yielded positive results, with 26% improving their human resources practices, 18% implementing family-friendly/flexible working policies, and 17% introducing targeted training (see cynicism above).
On the plus side, flexible working has increased: 98% of workplaces now offer some sort of policy (up from 85% in 2018). Whether policies are utilised is another thing altogether. I imagine it’s akin to the internal battle employees face whether to take sick leave. It’s great to have the option, but depending on the workplace, the optics mightn’t be good.
While 39% of men opted to work remotely during last year’s survey period, just 29% of women utilised the policy. Unsurprisingly, women lawyers were more likely to work different hours at 30%, compared to men at 13%.
Ultimately, it’s gender equality seems impossible where working around the clock – or “the road to partnership model” as I like to call it – reigns supreme. The model, of course, is ideally suited to those with fewer caregiving responsibilities. This, of course, could also explain why we’re not seeing more females in senior positions.
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