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.
“[Most lawyers] entering the profession at the early stage [are women], with the stark drop-off at the top . . . that’s been a trend over the last 20 to 30 years,” says Sara Carnegie, IBA director of legal projects. “It’s not changing, particularly in [private] sectors. The corporate legal world . . . is a sort of alpha-testosterone-fuelled environment.”
In the US, women still represent less than a quarter of equity partners and just over a third of non-equity partners — in a 1 percentage point rise in 2024 compared with the previous year — according to a report on gender diversity by the National Association for Law Placement, a non-profit organisation.
Yet, according to a study published last year by the American Bar Association, a professional body, for the first time, a majority of law firm associates and federal government lawyers were women.
But, says IBA president Almudena Arpón de Mendívil, “progress is occurring at an unacceptably slow pace”. Despite historical change, campaigners and industry insiders believe that “artificially” rigid working practices, rising childcare costs, the return to the office and an insidious culture of sexism will continue to put women at a disadvantage.
Since February, US President Donald Trump’s war on Big Law has emerged as a threat for female lawyers — and not just in the US. The president has launched an investigation into law firms’ diversity policies and signed executive orders targeting firms he deems hostile.
In May, a study by the Next 100 Years, a UK-based equality campaign, found that 64 per cent of women in law fear their firms will deprioritise diversity and inclusion as a result of Trump’s crackdown, which they worry may spill over to firms outside the US.
While some firms have challenged the executive orders, which threatened to restrict their work, others have cut deals with the president.
“[Some firms] are just going to try to keep their heads down and stay out of the target zone,” says Megan Gray, founder of GrayMatters, a Washington-based law and policy group.
In March, Freshfields reworded mentions of “diversity and inclusion” as “culture and inclusion” on its website, saying it was “part of our broader brand refresh”. The next month, the firm omitted a gender diversity breakdown from its new partners announcement, for the second consecutive year. Gender data was also absent from A&O Shearman’s annual partners announcement, along with the firm’s 2025 diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) targets.
DEI policies such as target-setting have lost favour in recent months amid a political backlash, particularly in the US, against such initiatives.
“We are at an important crossroads [that] can [either] swing us backwards [or take us] to the next level,” says Dana Denis-Smith, an equality campaigner and founder of the Next 100 Years initiative.
Quota setting to achieve gender equality is the least popular DEI measure among female lawyers today, according to a report by the IBA, while flexible working arrangements were considered the best DEI measure, followed by coaching and mentoring schemes.
“[Women] don’t want any more training on unconscious bias . . . any more symbolic gestures — [they] want real action,” says Denis-Smith, who also founded legal support group Obelisk Support to create “flexible jobs for mums who wanted to work in a different way”.
When she came up with the idea for Obelisk, which offers legal support to blue-chip companies such as Goldman Sachs, BT and Vodafone, Denis-Smith “couldn’t see many women high up” or “a route” for herself, while she was first training as a lawyer at a top London law firm. “I just thought, is this going to [be] like a 50-year plan? I don’t have 50 years.”
Obelisk’s propositions include working from lunch until late, after spending the morning with children; and spreading paid parental leave over a day a week for several years.
Rocketing childcare costs have deepened women’s need for flexible working arrangements “redesigned from the ground up”, says Denis-Smith, including customised hours and gender-neutral parental leave.
And pay should factor in childcare costs. “[If] you’re not paying me enough to pay for childcare,” she adds, “you’re forcing me out essentially.”
Looking ahead, only 16 per cent of women in law expect to see gender equality during their careers, according to the Next 100 Years.
“Overall, we have shifted,” says Denis-Smith. “But it’s not changed the system and the barriers that are making women still contemplate: can I do it? Can I stay long term — or do I have to have a shelf life?”
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