The Memo: International Women’s Day: The Chambers Student stats

With International Women’s Day just behind us, we thought now would be the perfect time to give you the lowdown on our latest statistics about women in the profession. Each year, alongside our telephone interviews with trainees to learn more about their work life, we also invite law firms to participate in our survey. Here, we ask trainees about things like the culture, working hours, and seat choices, and these responses feed into our data. 

In recent years, the data we collect has consistently shown that trainee cohorts are majority female, with our latest numbers at 62%. Interestingly, female survey respondents were also, on average, happier than their male counterparts. As such, a slightly larger percentage of female trainees intended to stay at their current firm for more than five years; more specifically, that's 55% of female respondents as opposed to 51% of their male counterparts. Though the numbers don’t tell us all the reasons why female trainees seem to be happier, they certainly start to paint a positive picture about changes in the legal profession. However, there is still a lack of representation at the partnership level, where only around 37% of more senior law firm roles are filled by women. 

In our survey, we also ask trainees how likely they would be to recommend a seat to others and, interestingly, the three seats most highly rated by female trainees were family, energy & natural resources, and technology. Male survey respondents, on the other hand, favoured antitrust, healthcare and corporate crime & investigations. 

We also ask trainees about their views on their firm’s attitude to diversity, equity & inclusion in the survey and during telephone interviews. We're pleased to report that we regularly hear about all sorts of interesting initiatives which mean firms can encourage and support their female talent. Affinity groups for female lawyers are commonplace at law firms,and allow women across the firm to connect in various ways, such as speaker events, lunches and mentoring opportunities. Additionally, there are various networks in the UK which support female lawyers. These include Women in the Law UK, American Women Lawyers in London, The Association of Asian Women Lawyers, Association of Women Solicitors London and Women Returners. Each of these organisations works to support female lawyers, whether that's community events for networking and socialising, or resources providing practical advice on career breaks and returning to work.