Helen Simpson feels guilty for letting her young son go to breakfast or an after-school club while she is at work. “My kids survived very well despite the worst fears (of my own mother),” she says.
Currently, Dentons’ UK and Middle Eastern managing partners have four children, between the ages of seven and 17. Simpson says he had to be comfortable “instead of throwing things away, outsourced and meeting everyone’s expectations.” Her son grew up to tell him that her breakfast club was his favorite era.
But as a senior woman in law, she is in the minority. Data from the International Bar Association, a specialized institution sampled from 170,000 lawyers across five continents, shows that women make up 47% of all lawyers, but only 38% of senior lawyers, but there is variation across different sectors and jurisdictions.
In general, the biggest gap between the proportion of women in the profession and leadership positions lies in England and Wales, Chile and Spain, the report says. (That gap has been “slightly” narrowing in the UK and Wales since 2015.
Meanwhile, Ukraine, Türkiye, Nigeria and the Netherlands have the highest number of female lawyers. The sector with the broadest gender gap at the advanced level, where men outperform women by 11 percentage points, is legal law, followed by the judicial and public sectors.
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“(Most lawyers) take part in the profession in the early stages (women), a stark drop-off at the top of the last 20-30 years. “It’s not changing, especially in the (private) sector. The legal world of companies is a kind of alpha testosterone fuel environment.”
In the US, women still represent less than a quarter of their equity partners, and more than a third of their non-equity partners (a 1 percentage point increase in 2024 compared to the previous year) — according to a report on gender diversity by the non-profit National Association of Legal Placement.
However, a study published last year by the American Bar Association found that for the first time in a professional institution, the majority of law firms and federal lawyers were women.
But IBA President Almudena Arpón de Mendívil says, “Progress is happening at an unacceptably slow pace.” Despite historic changes, campaigners and industry insiders believe that “artificially” strict labor practices, rising childcare costs, a return to the office and an insidious culture of sexism will continue to put women at a disadvantage.
Since February, the war on US President Donald Trump’s great laws has emerged as a threat not only to the US, but also to female lawyers. The president has launched an investigation into the law firm’s diversity policy and signed an executive order targeting companies they deemed hostile.
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In May, a UK-based equality campaign survey over the next 100 years found that 64% of women in the law fear that businesses will deprive them of diversity and inclusion as a result of Trump’s crackdown, and could ripple over businesses outside the US.
Some companies are challenging executive orders that threatened to limit their work, while others are cutting deals with the president.
“(Some companies) just bow their heads and try to leave the target zone,” said Megan Gray, founder of Graymatters, a Washington-based legal and policy group.
In March, Freshfields described the mention of “diversity and inclusion” as “part of a wide range of brand refreshments,” paraphrasing its website as “culture and inclusion.” The following month, for the second year in a row, the company omitted a breakdown of gender diversity from the announcement of its new partners. Gender data was also not found in the announcement of A&O Shearman’s annual partners and the company’s 2025 diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) targets.
DEI policies, such as targeting, have lost favour in recent months amid political backlash against such initiatives, particularly in the US.
“We are at an important crossroads (either) that we can swing (or take) us backwards to the next level.”
According to the IBA report, Quota setting for achieving gender equality is the least popular DEI scale among female lawyers today, but flexible work arrangements were considered the best DEI scale, followed by coaching and mentoring schemes.
“(Female) don’t want any more training on unconscious bias… More iconic gestures – (they) want real action,” says Dennis Smith.
When she came up with the idea of an obelisk, she offered legal support to blue chip companies such as Goldman Sachs, BT, and Vodafone, and Dennis Smith “routes” for herself and herself. “I just thought this would be (Be) like a 50-year plan? I don’t have 50 years.”
Obelisk suggestions include spending the morning with your child and then working from lunch until late. And for several years, it spreads paid parental leave for a week.
Rocket’s childcare costs, including customized time and gender-neutral parental leave, deepened women’s needs for flexible work arrangements “redesigned from scratch.”
Salary should take into consideration childcare costs. “If (if you) haven’t paid enough to pay me to childcare,” she adds.
From a future perspective, according to the next 100 years, only 16% of legal women expect to see gender equality in their careers.
“Overall, we’ve shifted,” says Dennis Smith. “But it hasn’t changed the system and barriers that women are still pondering. Can I do that? Can I stay for the long term?
