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Women in-house
There’s still a long way to go, but women have come a long way in the legal profession and are particularly excelling at in-house roles. Kellie Harpley reports
I’ll tell you the most chauvinistic thing you’ve ever heard,” Billy Connolly said at a recent show at the Hordern Pavillion in Sydney, before launching into a tale about a friend who was making a cup of tea for her grandfather. “How many sugars do you have?” she asked.
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask your granny,” was the reply.
Thankfully, society has progressed from that point, and even in the traditionally paternalistic legal profession women have, over the last two decades, come bounding in. Women are still underrepresented in the more senior positions, but compared to when Pamela Hass, immediate past president of the Australian Corporate Lawyers Association (ACLA), was admitted in 1978, the percentages have been almost reversed. “There were only five or six [women] who were admitted with me,” says Hass. Today, women make up more than 50 per cent of lawyers entering the profession.
A recent survey conducted by Beaton Consulting showed that women accounted for 52 per cent of lawyers in private practice. Of in-house legal practitioners, women made up 45 per cent.
ACLA CEO Peter Turner was surprised by these figures, as the Association assumed there was a greater proportion of women practising in-house. The results prompted the Association to consider conducting a more comprehensive national survey to get a clearer picture of the issue.
Something the Association wasn’t surprised about was the fact that women held only 17 per cent of senior positions in firms. Yet in-house, women claim as many as 30 per cent of those senior roles.
Turner says the figures reflect the dramatic escalation in ACLA’s female membership over the last three years. In 2003 women made up just 27 per cent of total membership and in 2004, 33 per cent. In 2005, they made up as much as 42 per cent.
In a reflection of the Beaton Consulting data, 30 per cent of the Association’s General Counsel Group are women, but Turner says this group, which was only reconsolidated last year, is still in formation and that figure could change.
These figures echo what is being seen in industry generally. “Women – particularly today’s generation of women – are starting to break through into the upper echelons of business. It’s a very good thing,” Turner says.
However, the percentage of women in senior roles is still “significantly lower than the number of women who are actually practising as solicitors within corporations,” says Rowena McNally, committee member with ACLA’s Queensland division.
She says the reasons for this are the same as in any other sector where women are underrepresented in the senior ranks. “Most corporation structures are more easily able to accommodate women coming through the management ranks than a monetary performance-based partnership promotion, which is generally the way in most law firms and other professions,” McNally says.
Gail Hartridge, a government lawyer for most of her career, is currently working on a project with the Justice Department part-time and is a director on the board of Australian Health Management. She says she’s been lucky enough throughout her career not to have “suffered greatly at the hands of discriminatory practices”. There was definitely a paternalistic attitude to women in the workplace when she started out. “There are a lot more women now in senior roles generally in the government,” she says.
But Hartridge agrees with McNally that women can have different motives to men when it comes to promotion. While they want interesting and challenging work and have aspirations to move up in their careers, “they are not necessarily looking to be the number one partner in a firm or the head of the department in government,” particularly when that involves many more hours.
“Once you get to a certain level as a lawyer in the government it’s very hard to progress as a lawyer. It is mostly moving over to a pure management role; there’s only limited senior roles as a lawyer and we are yet to see a female Crown Solicitor.”
The key for women in the workforce, according to Hartridge, is flexible working arrangements to allow them to fit their work hours around the family, including job sharing and workplace-associated child-care.
“A closer relationship between the workplace and childcare, or at least the flexibility to handle it, is what would keep women in the workforce in an almost full-time capacity. And that’s what enables you to get to those higher ranks – staying in there.”
As more women move into the profession and up through its senior ranks, says McNally, it becomes easier for others to follow. Ten to twenty years ago, the recruitment process tended to block women out of roles, with interviews predominantly conducted by senior male lawyers.
People tend to recruit people who are like them, and who make them feel comfortable,” McNally says. “But organisations are now looking at people in terms of their qualifications and their ability to do the job. That is advantageous to women because it gives us a foot in the door that we didn’t have before.”
Pamela Hass can relate to that. Growing up in Brisbane, her father a policeman, Hass knew from the age of 12 that she wanted to be a barrister. A family friend worked at the Supreme Court and would sometimes let her watch after school. “I just used to love the whole criminal court system and the whole environment.”
However, the year she was admitted, a comment from a person with substantial clout in the profession– that women shouldn’t be allowed to take appointments from men – made her rethink her options.
Instead, she applied for a job as a solicitor with a Brisbane law firm. At her final interview, one of the partners said to her, “Well, we used to have a female lawyer here, but she could type – can you type?”
“Well, to this day, I cannot type,” Hass says. “I walked out of there, I didn’t want the job, and I wasn’t going to work there. I went home and told my father and he was aghast. He could type better than I could. I have, on principle, never typed.”
Despite her excellent academic record – she went to law school at 17 and had graduated with honours by the age of 21 – Hass realised her career was going to be an uphill battle. Not only was she female, but she had no relatives in the legal profession, and she came from a working class background.
A move to Canberra put her on track with a position at the Australian Taxation Office, and then a legal traineeship with the Federal Attorney-General’s Department. This led to an opportunity to work in the Crown Solicitor’s Office, where she was the only female lawyer handling criminal prosecutions in Canberra.
Here she was lucky to work under “a very progressive boss, a true leader”.
“He was Scottish so he would say, ‘If you go over to court lassie, and you stuff up, the main thing is to come back and tell me immediately. There are no back doors here.’ It was totally irrelevant whether I was female, male, what suburb of Brisbane I came from, or whether I was 22 or 52. That was a very affirming experience.”
Hass believes the representation of women in-house is very strong, and notes that both the corporate and government lawyers of the year for 2005 were women. The Association has had three women as national presidents, and a number of state presidents and committee members.
But she is concerned that today’s women don’t realise how recently it was that women were at a severe disadvantage in the profession. “Unless people maintain the momentum, and at least be aware that all this doesn’t come easily, it’s going to be lost.” The profession still needs to get to a point where the question of gender does not come into the equation, she says.
“If a woman is a good practitioner and is competent and skilled and qualified, she should be able to have whatever opportunities she wants, in the same way that a man does. The question shouldn’t even be asked.”
McNally is less concerned about the future. “I would like to see, in 10 years time, a pretty much equal division of those senior roles, even in the private profession, between men and women,” she says. “I would be surprised if we’re not pretty close to being there.”
She says today’s women have grown up with “absolutely no expectation of discrimination”.
“They have a very assertive expectation of being treated equally, of their worth in the profession and of their belief that they have the right to ambition. I think they have a level of confidence that most of us didn’t have 20, or even 10 years ago,” McNally says.
Women have also gained an advantage by becoming more efficient in running their families and households. “We can order groceries on the internet and have them delivered. It’s much easier to be a professional juggling a family. We’ve got a lot more assistance and the women are so terribly capable,” says McNally. “I’m hoping by the time these young women come through to the point where they expect to be made partner, the remnants of the old guard will have fallen away.”
1-May-2006
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women , australian corporate , lawyers association , legal profession , women in law; in-house lawyers; corporate lawyers; discrimination; legal profession;
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