Legal Business

The Target – will tougher measures finally boost gender diversity in the City?

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Faced with dire rates of female retention, law firms have abandoned previous resistance to public gender targets for their partnerships. Will it work?

It had been a fairly dry debate at the 2013 Georgetown Law panel discussion in London, covering a number of worthy issues facing the profession. Dry at least until near the end, when a Legal Business journalist on the panel told the sizeable audience of lawyers that law firms were perfectly able to function commercially while haemorrhaging female lawyers, the caveat being that if the profession was waiting for economic drivers to solve the gender diversity dilemma, it would be a long wait. The journalist then mentioned that the profession may want to consider more drastic measures.