Biglaw

Prominent Law Firm Paid Female Employees 30 Percent Less In Bonuses

And women get 19 percent less in average hourly earnings.

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This is the impact transparency can have. In compliance with a recent U.K. regulation requiring employers with over 250 employees to submit data on the gender pay gap, Silver Circle law firm Herbert Smith Freehills reported that in 2017 women employees made 30 percent less in bonuses than male employees, and 19 percent less in average hourly earnings.

According to the firm, the attention grabbing difference is due to a difference in roles, with 22 percent of the women at the firm occupying secretarial roles. As Law.com reports:

HSF said that its mean gender pay gap is skewed by the distribution of women and men within different types of roles in the firm. While gaps within each pay quartile are relatively small, the firm has a large proportion of women in the lower and lower middle quartiles, taking the female mean average down.

But here’s the bad news: even if you were to exclude employees in those roles, there would still be a pay gap of 8.8 percent. The (relatively) good news is that women employees were (slightly) more likely to receive a bonus than men — 77 percent of women got bonuses compared with 71 percent of men.

In a statement about the numbers, managing partner for the UK, US and EMEA, Ian Cox, said:

We welcome the introduction of gender pay gap reporting as an important contributor to transparency, and we are committed to working to reduce or eliminate any gap that exists.

We are committed to gender diversity and the attraction, promotion and retention of women across all levels of the firm, and we will continue to ensure we attract a diverse pool of candidates to all types of job roles. As part of our ongoing work to foster gender balance across the firm, we monitor the gender impact of our reward processes, and we run a wide variety of initiatives aimed at helping all our employees reach their full potential.

But this isn’t the only bad news for the firm on the gender equality front. In 2014 the firm set a target that 25 percent of the partnership globally should be women by 2017, and while the overall percentage of women partners has increased, they’ve fallen short of that target, though they are clearly working on improving. As the firm’s report reveals:

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In 2014, we set a target to have 30% women in our global partnership by 2019, with an interim target of 25% by 2017. Globally, 22.5% of our partners are women – up from 17.5% when we set the targets – and the majority of our global practice groups and regions have hit the interim target. In Business Services, we set a target that neither gender would represent more than 60% or fewer than 40% of senior roles. In 2017, women are in 54% of senior Business Services roles.

Part of the firm’s effort to address the pay gap includes a variety of networking opportunities for women, as well as a variety of other resources to ensure women are recruited and retained:

There are many other initiatives that underpin our efforts to address the gender pay gap – our agile working policy, for example, gives people greater flexibility and more control over how they work. In addition, we offer benefits such as childcare assistance and maternity ‘coaching’ – support for planning and managing the departure and return to work – to help people balance the demands of their professional and personal lives.

There is obviously still a gender-based pay gap at this and many other law firms. But it is only through transparency that we can begin to address the issue.

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headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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