Diversity

In our book, it’s about constantly promoting an inclusive culture that encourages everyone to realise their full potential. Through that approach comes true teamwork, and real strength.

So let’s start with you – and your own distinct strengths, ambitions, priorities and perspectives. These elements are what make you different from everyone else, and they from you.

We’ve worked assiduously to create an environment where people with different talents, cultures and outlooks benefit from working together – and so offer our clients a much greater range and depth of knowledge and experience.

Diversity in action doesn’t happen by itself, but because ordinary people make it happen. Our own advances stem from the work of some very passionate and committed individuals.

In the past five years, our employees have built up a thriving in-house Diversity Employee Network, spanning a broad cross-section of offices, practice groups and roles.

Along the way, we’ve reached a few milestones – from being the first law firm to become a Diversity Champion on Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, to winning The Lawyer HR Award for the most effective diversity programme in 2011.

And it doesn’t end here. Diversity is a live and constantly evolving business issue, and we’re intent on extending the reach and effectiveness of our actions. Push for change, and you’ll be pushing at an open door.

Gender diversity

A key diversity challenge for most large law firms is the gender balance at senior levels of the firm. At Pinsent Masons, 24% of our Partners are female. This compares well with top 20 law firms, but we are working to improve this figure. The firm has put in place a series of measures to address this, which includes:

• we have a thriving Female Network Group in the firm which provides networking opportunities for its members to develop internal and external client relationships, gives input to firm policy and provides a sounding board for women across the firm
• we ran a female-only career development survey which asked females (both lawyers and business support) for their views on the career development opportunities in the firm, barriers to progression and suggestions for change. This attracted a healthy response and a number of new initiatives are now being developed as a result. We plan to run a male-only control group survey to be clear about the differences between female and male viewpoints on career development within the firm
• the career survey told us that women in the firm would welcome mentoring by senior females. We have subsequently selected and trained a number of senior women to play a mentoring role
• we established a senior female steering group to provide senior leadership for our female agenda. This consists of three senior female Partners who have been working with the head of our female network group to challenge policy and develop fresh initiatives in support of achieving  better advancement of women in the business to senior positions
• we have run a series of "women in the boardroom" events with clients. This involved providing a written and verbal analysis of the recommendations from Lord Davies' Women on Boards report and facilitating a debate amongst clients on how they can develop and appoint a greater number of female Board members 
• Our analysis of common deterrents to female career progression highlighted the fact that there are three key skills which commonly hold women back – networking skills, commercial know-how and confidence. We therefore sought a programme which would help address all three areas. The one we chose is entitled the "Pearl Club", which consists of a series of activities for women involving networking skills development, commercial awareness input from female FTSE350 Directors, and exposure to senior female role models. We selected 17 women for this programme and as well as having the opportunity to develop these key skills, participants are also benefiting from extra opportunities to network with women in client organisations