Helen Simpson remembers pangs of guilt about putting her young son in breakfast and after-school clubs while she was at work. “Despite [my own mother’s] worst fears, my children are surviving remarkably well,” she says.
Now managing partner for the UK and Middle East at Dentons, with four children aged between seven and 17, Simpson says she had to become comfortable “ditching things, outsourcing and not meeting everyone’s expectations”. Her son grew up to tell her breakfast clubs had been his favourite times.
But as a senior woman in law she is in the minority. Data from the International Bar Association, a professional body, sampled from 170,000 lawyers across five continents, shows that women make up 47 per cent of all lawyers, but only 38 per cent of lawyers in senior positions — although there are variations in different sectors and jurisdictions.
The largest gaps between the proportion of women in the profession generally and in leadership positions are in England and Wales, Chile and Spain, the report says. (That gap has narrowed “slightly” in England and Wales since 2015, according to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.)
Meanwhile, Ukraine, Turkey, Nigeria and the Netherlands have the largest number of senior female lawyers. The sector with the widest gender gap at senior level, where men outnumber women by 11 percentage points, is corporate law, followed by the judiciary and public sector.
