 PANEL DISCUSSION Global Diversity in Law Firms FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER 2007
The number of female lawyers around the world was fast matching - and in some countries even exceeding - levels of men, but the glass ceiling was still hindering their ascent to highest echelons of the profession, participants in a debate on women in law were told. Despite the fact that in Europe, China and the US, many law firms had achieved numerical gender equality, the number of women partners was still dwarfed by the figure for men, they heard. Elisabeth Noe, a partner at the Paul Hastings law firm in the US, said this situation was highlighted by the fact that although 30 per cent of America's 1.2 million lawyers were women, there was still only one female Supreme Court judge. "Women lawyers in the US have existed as long as the country has existed, but there is still a bias in our society over the role of women,” she added. “There is a backlash these days, where women are even starting to say they feel guilty about going to the office, which is odd because men never seem to feel that way. The glass ceiling is still there, and it's there because white men like to play golf with other white men." Yan Lan, a partner at Gide Loyrette Nouel law firm in Beijing, China, said if figures for women in the legal profession in China had been compared to the US 25 years ago, the contrast would have been dramatic. But since the cultural revolution of the 1980s, women had made massive inroads into the law in her country. She said: "The concept of having women involved in the legal system in China is relatively young, and has only really been apparent over the past quarter of a century." But changes had been swift, and in China now 22 per cent of judges, 21 per cent of prosecutors and 25 per cent of lawyers were women, she said. However, they were still denied access to real power, Yan said, and described the statistic that 97 per cent of partners in Chinese law firms were still men as ‘frankly alarming’. She told the audience made up mainly of Chinese, American and French lawyers: "Confucious said a woman's destiny is in the kitchen, and this traditional view still influences the legal profession in China." Yan told how when she first joined a law firm in Paris more than ten years ago, the boss informed her that they had a long-standing policy of not making women partners in the firm. She said: "I was shocked and surprised at this, so I explained to him that Chairman Mao had told the Chinese that women held up half the sky, and that women could do anything men could do. "I thought this was quite persuasive, but the thing that really swung it was when I also quoted to him the French expression which translates as 'Only the stupid won't change their minds'. Then a few years later I became the firm's first ever female partner!" Gilles August, a founding partner of August and Debouzy law firm in Paris, said women had made huge inroads into the French legal profession since they were first allowed to join the Paris bar in 1900, to the point that their numbers were now close to matching men. And in universities and law schools, women legal students were now outnumbering men by ten per cent, he said. He added: "We have had female lawyers in France for 107 years. In 1946 women were allowed to become magistrates and that was coincidentally the same year they won the right to vote and that a woman was first elected to the French Supreme Court. "But today, 46 per cent of all lawyers in France are women, 60 per cent of trainees are women, the majority of judges are women and the Minister of Justice is a woman,” he said. "I don't have the statistics, but I suspect the majority of secretaries and receptionists are women too, meaning most law offices are dominated by women." However, only two out of every ten partners was female, he said, meaning French women experienced the same problems gaining any real influence in the profession as elsewhere. He added: "When I stared work 25 years ago my first boss told me the law was becoming a feminine profession and said it was not a good sign. He said women would leave us impoverished. Thankfully, even if the statistics haven't moved on as much as we may have hoped over the last few years, attitudes like that have." ______________________________ |