The pay gap regime applies to all UK businesses which employ more than 250 people. Our annual report outlines data relating to our UK workforce analysing pay gap data from a gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability perspective.
A foreword from Andrew Masraf and Laura Cameron:
Andrew Masraf
Now in its eighth year, our Pay Gap Report for 2024 reaffirms our ongoing commitment to broadening diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels of the firm, globally. As the incoming government has doubled down on the importance of driving gender parity and narrowing the pay gap, this report has once again provided a timely opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve made in our mission to provide a workplace with equity of opportunity at its core.
In this reporting period we made several stellar appointments to our senior leadership team, including naming Laura Cameron as our first female Managing Partner in May 2023. We also welcomed a new female Chief People Officer and a new female Chief Technology Officer, both of whom have significant roles to play in driving transformative progress for our business.
Since our first report in 2018, our median partner pay gap figure has fallen 15.5%, thanks to a focused set of initiatives to boost gender parity in the partnership, such as our 50% female partner promotion target. In the same period, the mean employee gap has fallen by 7.2%, and the combined employee and partner gap median has fallen by 10.7%, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach.
As we continue our equity efforts into 2025, we will hold ourselves accountable to our targets, taking views from across the firm on how we can further cultivate a workplace that works for all. So, for the first time we’re publishing an action plan to set out how we intend to accelerate meaningful careers for everyone.
Acting as a statement of our intent, the action plan will underpin our efforts to narrow the pay gap and drive inclusion and representation for all our people and our communities in the year ahead.
Laura Cameron
For us, the diversity mission is two-fold. It’s about both doing our bit to broaden access to the legal profession itself and once people are in, levelling access to progression and career development for all.
In service of this mission, we’ve introduced graduate recruitment processes designed to minimise adverse impact on all groups. We do this by viewing live diversity information for each stage of the process, so we can tackle any potential equity issues in real time, rather than look back on issues at the end of campaign. We have further boosted access to law by paying the National Living Wage for those who undertake both our vacation and work experience schemes and by providing a bursary access scheme to address the travel, accommodation, clothing and technology needs of participants.
At the partnership level, we have revamped our partner promotion process to better support women on their journey to partnership. In practice this meant that 45.5% of those promoted to the partnership in 2024 were female, a step toward our objective for women to make up 35% of the partnership by 2027.
As with our 2023 report, this year we’re sharing our gender, disability, ethnicity, and sexual orientation pay gaps alongside our social mobility pay gap, continuing our commitment to going beyond what’s statutorily required and demonstrating how seriously we take the task of achieving equity for everyone at the firm.
We are proud of the steps we’ve made towards narrowing our pay gaps, but we recognise that there’s always more we can do.
Report Archive