‘Mark Zuckerberg,’ a social media post from the team of satirical TV show Have I Got News For You, reads, ‘says he wants “masculine energy” to replace “feminine energy” in the work place. He could start by shaving off his nan’s perm.’
It has been reposted many thousands of times. Perhaps, as US corporate titans dash on bended knee to Mar-a-Lago, keen to prove diversity and equality are now off their minds, such humour is decency’s last redoubt.
Obviously only very few of you will have Meta as a client, but will any of you follow suit?
I’d be surprised. Whereas the diversity and equality record of corporate law firms often falls short of both the aspiration and the spin, I don’t think big law will follow.
The business case for equality and diversity can be closely mapped in a profession, and it’s fairly unarguable. Succession is central to the sustainability of the law firm model, and legal leaders will be thinking beyond a four-year Trump term.
Why am I so sure?
For one thing, I’ve become attached to a legal project (there will be a book, eventually) for which I’ve tracked the legal sector’s experience of, and attempts to tackle, its gender pay gap. We now have six years of reporting, a legal requirement for any employer with over 250 employees, of roughly the top-100 law firms’ gender pay gaps.
I’ll save any big reveals for the book, but what’s notable is the way treatment of the pay gap has changed over the last 74 years – from being about fairness to identifying a hard business case.
A desire to close the gender pay gap starts as an aspiration by the International Labour Organisation in 1951, given a significant boost by its inclusion in the Rome Treaty 1957 which established the European Economic Community.
The EEC’s founding members made a clear commitment, affirmed by each new member: ‘Each Member State shall during the first stage ensure and subsequently maintain the application of the principle that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work.’
Back then, the now quaintly industrial talk was of ‘piece work’ and ‘units’, as the problem the Treaty sought to address was unequal pay for men and women doing identical work.
By the 1970s, legislation, court cases and industrial disputes helped to drastically reduce incidences of identical work attracting equal pay for men and women. The focus shifted to equal pay for ‘work of equal value’. It is a principle still litigated today, with Birmingham City Council and retailer Next among those who have faced claims for unequal pay for equivalent work – offering greater rewards to roles that men tend to outnumber women in.
Something else has been happening, though. As we entered the new millennium, the European Council adopted a new position, aiming to reduce persistent gender pay gaps, ‘with a view to providing opportunities for both women and men to meet their aspirations and to fulfil their potential’.
At which point, UK policy makers, forever preoccupied in the country’s long-term problem with productivity, get interested. To what extent, one study asked, are ‘business-led approaches’ maximising ‘female human capital’?
A Cabinet Office Review also used the language of ‘maximising returns’. It concluded: ‘A high proportion of women were remaining static within the organisation while the men moved through to the higher grades. This presented a business problem both because it was felt that many of the women were operating below their potential and thus depriving the company of valuable skills and expertise and that such stasis… impeded the promotion opportunities for those below them in the organisation.’
This is the point essentially accepted by hard-headed leaders of law firms. Day to day, firms with a gender pay gap of (when partners are included) 50% or 60%, might rather their record was not front-of-stage.
But they also know that if the only tool in the toolbox they can reach for when they need to pay, for example, stratospheric newly qualified salaries is more time billed, then they are missing a trick. If they can fix a situation whereby their people, in this case women, are operating below their potential – or leaving after years of investment in developing their knowledge and skills – then the pressure on unsustainable increases in time billed would be eased.
Which aside for the notion of fairness, or even just being unobnoxious, is a rather hard-nosed way of looking at the importance of ‘feminine energy’.
Any law firm leader checking Facebook will be prompted by the question ‘What’s on your mind?’ For reasons of sound business, and common sense, they’ll have a different answer to Zuckerberg.
5 Readers' comments