Regulations under The Equality Actlast year gave UK companies a mandate that their gender pay gap statistics be published - and this month it has been the turn of the legal sector to release their findings. Spoiler alert: gender parity, shockingly, remains elusive.
Companies with more than 250 employees have been required to publish their pay gap figures, the proportion of women and men in each quarter of their pay structure, and details of bonus pay gaps. In news that will stun no one, women are lagging behind at every level, even in cases in which results are being subtly manipulated. For instance, where firms might elect to publish a relatively small pay gap which appears promising, digging a little deeper will often reveal a significantly wider pay gap in bonuses at that same firm. Furthermore, there is no obligation on law firms and legal businesses to provide information about their “partners” - since partners are technically self-employed. The exclusion of partners often adds a gloss to the position stats, sanitising the reality that the number of women in senior roles and sitting on executive boards is still shamefully low. Yet at entry level in most firms, the gender split still tends to be close to 50/50.
So let’s look at why this is. With some exceptions, of course, from the general trend, the recent publications have revealed that in terms of salary, bonuses, promotion and representation in senior roles, sadly that glass ceiling is still in place. But it’s not so explicitly simple as “you can’t have this promotion or this bonus because you’re a woman.” The glass ceiling is no longer this identifiable line: it’s now more as if the ceiling has broken and the shards have fallen down – each one of them landing on women in various places on various levels, hindering them in more indistinct ways. The gender subtexts are a lot more subtle, and as a result, much harder to identify.
But that cannot excuse the present inertia of the corporate world. Outdated assumptions for the pay gap today, like essentialist explanations for the lack of female representation at senior levels, are allowing firms to shirk responsibility for progressive action. The lack of understanding for the disparity, together with the failure to scrutinise vehicles of the masculine hegemony at play in the corporate world, are stunting progress.
Let’s take representation of women in senior positions. The natural answer to why, in terms of career progression, female representation tends to wane at senior level, is that children come into the equation. Indeed, in general, women still take on the majority of parental and childcare responsibilities, and within a heteronormative family unit, their careers are more likely to take a hit than the career of their partner. But this feels too uncomplicated, too simplistic a response. Not all women have children, and those who do not are still feeling the force of an inhibiting process of some kind. The over-simplified response of looking merely at remedial approaches for working mothers, such as flexible working hours and longer, paid maternity leaves, allows firms to evade responsibility for action and dodge their own shortcomings. The approach has real essentialist overtones and is extremely othering for women who don’t have children – who is representing their interests? Women are being held back by so much more than their parental responsibilities: these are the patriarchal structures in place within the corporate workplace that foster gender disparity.
Now let’s look at a few of them. On the whole, more men than women are getting promoted. The further up the ladder, the worse this gets. If more men are progressing from solicitor to associate, then the pool of associates from which a senior associate is pulled lacks female representation, and as a result men are getting those promotions too - and so on. When considering why this might be, the trope of “men take more risks, women are more risk-averse,” Lehman Sisters-discussion rears its head without fail. Following the financial crisis in 2008, Christine Lagarde told journalists that if the Lehman brothers had been Lehman sisters, the financial crisis might not have happened. Lagarde’s musings snowballed into a popular hypothesis, which posited that women are more risk-averse than men. I’m uncomfortable with this explanation.
This is an explanation that is not even subtly essentialist, and one that insinuates that it is not the firms’ fault that women aren’t putting themselves up for promotion. Cordelia Fine writes beautifully in the FT on the subject– effectively dismantling the trope and concluding that it’s pretty much bull. She writes, “risk management in financial institutions is too important to be guided by scientific ideas well beyond their sell-by date. Blaming financial misadventures on a testosterone-fuelled male drive distracts us from what’s more likely to make a difference: regulation and culture. The best in-house antidote for bankers selling junk products and regulators bending to conflicts of interest isn’t women; it’s a dismissal slip.” I have to agree.
That said, I think that the trope is closely linked to the notion of women and their measure of worth, which may be a more useful conversation to tap into. Historically, women have had to fight much harder to prove their worth, to prove they can match up. Of course, the implicit assumption underlying these pursuits is the patriarchy’s assumption that women don’t measure up. When statistics tend to indicate that women are less likely to put themselves up for promotion, or to ask for that raise, relevant explanations for this should not lie in assumptions about women and risk-taking, but in context: women may be less aware of their worth than men, given that they have been conditioned historically to undervalue themselves and to work consistently to prove they measure up.
This case becomes amplified ten-fold when looking at women of colour. Women of colour have to work hard just to prove they measure up to white women, and then prove themselves against men. They’re ten steps behind at the starting blocks. It’s essential to bear mind that the issues developed in this discussion and the statistics presented are inevitably white-washed, and the intersectionality required to truly address the pay gap runs further than merely gender.
But that’s not to say that this context excuses law firms from eliciting action to tackle this. The measure of success in the work place is closely linked to discussions about the measure of worth. Specifically in the legal sector, there are certain criteria which indicate strong performance. These tend to congregate around closing big deals, winning those big client pitches - “machismo” processes which women are often excluded from. For example, performing well in client pitches has often required a certain charisma and bravado. It is all about charming a client and obtaining their trust. In short, it is seen as risky to put this responsibility on a woman: a female demonstrating that same confidence and charisma can be received and interpreted in all manner of ways – she is over-confident, she is smug, she is bolshy.
There are so many avenues down which a woman might strike the wrong tone. The risk is not the same with men. Particularly if the client you’re pitching to is headed up by old, white men. Using trust as a basis in their experiment, the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway University found that “feelings of similarity towards others extend beyond social closeness and into physical characteristics.”What I’m saying is: let’s face it, old white men trust old white men. Just take a look at Trump’s cabinet.
However, these concepts are often not so obvious when they are in motion in the working world. It’s only in taking a step back and analysing certain facets of the environment that they become easier to detect. Another dimension to consider in this is unconscious bias. Unconscious bias plays an immense role in the pay gap narrative. When bonus time comes around each year, it is often assumed that the man is the breadwinner in his family, and, given that he has children to raise, deserves a bonus. With women this works in reverse, as their husband, perceived to be the breadwinner, will probably get a bonus. The sentiment comes from a (sort of) good place, but the structures and the assumptions behind it are awful. Unconscious bias plays a huge role in recruitment and promotion too. A university friend once told me that he likes to wear his Oxford sports team tie to interviews, on the off chance that the interviewer may have belonged to the same team once upon a time. Understanding the game makes you a better player, I guess.
So, what next? There is undoubtedly a lot of work to be done. Female employees in the corporate world and the legal sector are being held back by structures and assumptions which consistently undermine them. It is those powers above that need to shake the change and take it seriously. It is hoped at the very least that the publication of these results will embarrass the legal sector into action. But this action needs focus – firms must reassess the structures in place which are excluding women. The solution cannot merely be a matter of giving more bonuses to women so as to balance out the stats. The same for promotions, and so on. Firms must be looking at the context in which bonuses are given out, or why men are overwhelmingly promoted, and checking that unconscious bias. If the way firms are actually thinking is not changing, then their actions are superficial and the whole process is redundant. It is, of course, a complex process, but if the process is not undertaken in all of its complexity, then the rebalance is not really a rebalance and it is not real equality.
