Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

DIVERSITY, RACE AND GENDER IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION (PROMOTING DIVERSITY…

- - - - Formal diversity thus reflects the basic intuition that in a competitive, equal society, the diversity of the populace will and ought to be reflected in diversity in its educational system and in its various occupations and professions. ELI WALD
        
        Formal diversity has been questioned by some commentators. One question relates to the assumption that all groups have the same desires and aims.
  - - - sees equality not as something to be measured in terms of numbers, but rather as questions of participation in the profession, the quality of experience of people in the profession, and attitudes and values upheld by the profession.
- - - - However, the inequality becomes more apparent when looking at the senior positions within the professions
        
        the average salary for a female lawyer is £51,396 less than that of the average male lawyer; women lawyers also receive, on average, half the amount in bonuses received by men. (SOMMERLAD)
        
        women are ‘under-represented, underpaid and marginalised (MCGLYNN)
  - - - Antony Dursi notes, it is easy to exaggerate the lack of social diversity at the Bar: ‘The view that the Bar is still a male, public school, Oxbridge elite still pervades. In reality, the majority of pupil barristers are now normally women, state school educated and less than a third are Oxbridge graduates.’ While he argues that the situation is not as bad as the common perception, he acknowledges that there is still room for improvement
  - - - some have suggested that BME lawyers often seek to escape from the cultures of larger firms and are more likely to be practising alone and that this can be linked with non-compliance which is why the figure is larger for them.
- - - - She adds that the Supreme Court should be ashamed if it does not become more diverse
        
        BUT: There are more women than men who are not prepared to put up with that. As a lifestyle choice, it’s very hard to quarrel with it, but you have to face the consequence, which is that the top of the legal profession has fewer women in it than the profession overall does Lord Sumption
- - - - the gendered division of care work and expectations around mothering explain the decision of a woman to focus, say, more on care that work. The ‘playing field’ in the professional world is unequal owing to a range of disadvantages that are placed by society on women. What is described as a ‘choice’ is rather a reflection of an attempt to balance the competing demands on their work? Often, too, these choices are assumed, as Clare McGlynn suggests; motherhood is taken to mean a reduced commitment to work, in a way that it is not the case for fatherhood.
  - - - can cover issues from what clothes are worn and the way in which people speak to assumptions about knowledge
- - - - Interestingly, despite these, a study of BME lawyers found that nearly all believed that firms failed to have fair or transparent recruitment processes. There is still a widely held belief that there are hidden routes to obtaining training contracts available to those with good contacts or those who are ‘in the know
  - - - tends to require a simplification of complex matters such as race and sex into ‘tick boxes’. It can also impose extra bureaucracy and raises concerns that it is leading to explicit or implicit quotas
  - - - is still very informal and 'macho culture"