Women lawyers overwhelmingly oppose the introduction of quotas as a tool to help more of them into senior positions in firms, it emerged at an international conference last week.

As the proportion of women on boards of FTSE100 companies looks set to pass 25%, the International Women in Law Summit 2012 heard that, in the legal sector, equality is moving at a ‘glacial’ pace with men still dominating the top jobs. In the US, 98% of law firms’ highest-paid partners are men.

However, women lawyers at the conference said that rather than ‘patronising’ quotas, they wanted diversity targets for firms to work towards. This would encourage firms to adopt ­practices that help women overcome barriers to promotion and to rise through their own ­talent.

In the opening address, Law Society vice-president Lucy Scott-Moncrieff warned: ‘History shows dominant groups only loosen their grip on power if it is in their interests to do so. Law firms do not want tokenism, but just to do business; we must show them that gender-neutral practices are good for business.’

She went on to make the ‘bold assumption’ that law firms wanted to obey the law. More gender diversity awareness might help them recognise ‘inadvertent discrimination’ and take steps to avoid litigation, she said.

LexisNexis chief executive Judy Vezmar told the conference that respondents to a global survey blamed ‘bad management’ for not allowing firms to benefit from all the best male and female talent available. Talk of gender equality has been going on so long that people ‘tune out’ terms like ‘work-life balance’, Vezmar said. However, she added that quotas are the norm in some countries and seem to work.

City firm Ashurst senior partner Charles Geffen told the conference that partners’ meetings at his firm increasingly focused on ‘people issues’, such as providing greater flexibility for ‘returners’ from motherhood career breaks. The firm knows that progress towards greater fairness will be ‘uneven’, but he is confident that progress will be made, he said.

Milestones on Ashurst’s journey so far include introducing the term ‘remote working’ rather than ‘working from home’, and banning ‘work-life balance’ in favour of ‘work-life fit’ - how to fit a career into one’s life. ‘Transactional work,’ he conceded, ‘when you need to be there 24/7, is a very difficult fit.’

Geffen confessed that he is ‘battered and bruised’ from trying to drive through change and described his own lack of confidence as ‘an inhibitor’ when discussing, with female colleagues, what the firm can do for them. ‘The intellectual case is clear, but the journey is hard,’ he added.

BP group general counsel Rupert Bondy, talking about the role of culture in women’s careers, noted that men have children at the same time as women ‘but don’t seem to feel the same dilemma’. His own team included a man who worked flexibly, he said: ‘But I recognise the stereotype that men in law firms appoint men because of a shared interest in talking about sport.’

A breakout session considering the pros and cons of targets, quotas and all-women shortlists decided that something of the sort had to be done to improve gender diversity across the profession - because no other measures had yet worked. City firm Ashurst partner Helen Burton, chairing the session, said: ‘One argument in favour of quotas is you can judge a woman’s performance once she is in place. If she is as good as she should be, then you have proved the business case for quotas.’

Most delegates, in an end-of-conference poll, voted overwhelmingly for targets - something to aspire to and work towards with the appropriate practices established across the firm.

Nicky Paradise (pictured), until last ­summer managing partner of City firm Nabarro for 12 years, told the Gazette: ‘It is important to address the issue directly. What gets measured, such as targets for diversity, gets done - that’s the law firm culture. Women will become what they need to become to progress, although morphing into the male way of doing things is never a good thing and probably impossible. There have been so many times over the years that I have been unable to do things I wanted to do with my two children because of commitments to the firm.’

Paradise said that her firm did not suffer from the ‘City old boys’ club’ mentality of other firms. She had become a partner in 1990, when female partners were even rarer than they are today. She said: ‘There was no set policy, it was purely cultural. Gender was simply not an issue and Nabarro still has lots of female partners today.’

Although upbeat about prospects for women in the law, Paradise recalled a managing partners’ meeting that she attended in summer 2011. ‘There were 35 guests and I was the only woman. It is disappointing that there has been so little change in the profession over the last 10-20 years,’ she said.

A breakout session on the role of workplace culture in women’s careers noted the findings of the Law Society’s 2010 survey of women in the law and regretted that so little had changed. For example, law firms are still characterised by a masculine work-all-hours ­culture and by the gap between official policy and what is ­actually allowed to happen.

Chairing the session, Trudi Charles, group managing counsel at BP Global Fuels, talked of the need to release women from the ‘culture of presenteeism’ and the ‘tyranny of the timesheet’ before they could fulfil their career ambitions.

Closing the conference, American Bar Association (ABA) president-elect Laurel Bellows said: ‘My ambition as ABA president is to focus on catapulting gender equality to the forefront of all that we do. I have power. I use it and I love it, but I use it like a woman, not for myself.’