Men taking parental leave holds the key to women’s advancement at law firms
In recent years, leading law firms have made concerted efforts to improve gender diversity in their ranks, but when it comes to real power, progress remains insufficient.
Many of the top law firms have set targets for partnerships and leadership roles, aiming to fill at least 40 per cent of these positions with women by 2030, including Linklaters, Baker McKenzie and Clifford Chance.
Yet there is still a lot of groundwork to be done in the legal sector to give women a bigger slice of the pie, as data shows just 32 per cent of full-equity partners at law firms across England and Wales are women.
This is despite 53 per cent of the firms’ headcount now being filled by women.
So what is holding women back from being part-owners in law firms and bringing home between £1m and £3m (at the top firms)? It seems that maternity leave, motherhood, and the return to work remain the Achilles’ Heel that hinders women’s careers.
Consider a woman (let’s call her Jane) and a man (let’s call him John) starting out as juniors at a firm and working their way up the ladder together. If she decides to become a mother, she will need maternity leave. While she is off, her male counterpart continues up the ladder, so by the time she returns to work, she is no longer on the same rung.
The motherhood penalty
The question of motherhood plagues most women at some point in their careers – this feeling is sector-agnostic, as starting a family will always lean heavily on women.
But working at a top City law firm where you are expected to spin several plates at once can make it difficult to come back after months off, to say nothing of dealing with a lack of sleep.
Helena Brown, partner at Addleshaw Goddard, told Morning Wire that when she had her first job at a previous firm, she struggled to return to work because there were few senior role models available.
“I accepted that I wouldn’t progress as quickly because I had chosen to do part-time… but I never accepted that I’d never progress,” she explained, adding, “For those years, it was 10 years I did part-time. I was happy… I accepted that I wouldn’t progress as quickly because I had chosen to do three days a week.”
However, she highlighted that by not being seen in the office five days a week, due to opting for part-time work, “you’re perceived as, oh, that’s the person who leaves at five o’clock, and that’s the person that… can’t work on a Friday.”
Efficiency as necessity
Brown pointed out that, as a busy working mum, she didn’t have 15 hours; she had around 10, so she needed to be super efficient, which she said “made me a better lawyer.”
However, despite this being long before the pandemic, which taught people how to work remotely and made the concept much more acceptable, returning to the office after having a child is still not easy for some women.
“What I’m experiencing is a reluctance by women returning from maternity leave to ask for part-time work because they’re so terrified of being sidelined,” Christine Braamskamp, London managing partner of Jenner & Block, told Morning Wire.
She added that she thinks the legal sector in London has “actually done extremely little” to make that return to work easier and more accommodating for women.
Braamskamp has been championing making it easier for people to become parents without suffering in their careers. Back in 2024, the London office of Jenner & Block revamped its parental leave policy, increasing it from 2 weeks to up to 20 weeks.
At the time, she told Morning Wire that the policy helps new fathers understand and share the experience of ‘winding down and winding up’ in their careers, as much as new mothers do.
It should go without saying that women who want to become mothers should not be penalised more than their male counterparts who are also becoming fathers, without affecting their career ladders.
Shared parental leave
With the new generation of men and women taking shared parental leave comes another issue: they are being managed by a generation that may not understand the rise in fathers taking extended time off to be with their families.
But with the rapid rise in the cost of living in the UK, a two-parent income is fast becoming the norm and there needs to be a shift in the mindset that, for too many, still sees parenthood as primarily a woman’s job.
Additionally, while several factors are driving the plummeting birth rate, it will be no shock to older generations of women that younger women are not keen to see their hard work pushed aside if they choose to become a parent.
This is a topic that will continue to be a problem, as it is women who hold the biggest job in bringing a child into this world, but with policies in place to allow men more than a fortnight home with their partner and child, the shift in attitude towards parenthood being a shared job needs to be understood by managers as well as prospective parents.
Eyes on the Law is a weekly column by Maria Ward-Brennan focused on the legal sector.