Diversity: Women still under-represented at partner level
The country’s largest law firms continue to lag behind the rest of the profession in promoting women and ethnic minority solicitors to partner, authoritative new figures have shown.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) this week released diversity data from 2015 – when it first started requiring the profession to fill in returns – to the latest exercise in 2025, where 99.5% of law firms reported their data, covering more than 225,000 people working in 8,876 firms.
This showed that 55% of lawyers were women, up from 48% in 2015, with men down from 50% to 43% (2% preferred not to say).
The under-representation of women at partner level has improved. At 40% (35% full equity, 49% salaried), it was up from 32% in a decade, but this varied by firm size, ranging from 48% at firms of six to nine partners, to 37% of the largest firms of 50+ partners.
Firms whose main area of law was criminal or corporate law both had a lower-than-average proportion of women lawyers, at 40% and 47% respectively. Private client law had a higher-than-average figure of 58%.
Nearly three-quarters of non-lawyer staff at law firms were women last year.
The proportion of lawyers from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) background rose from 14% to 20% over the 10 years. This broke down into 13% Asian, 3% Black, 3% Multiple/Mixed and 1% from other ethnic groups.
Government figures show that 18% of the UK workforce were from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds (7% Asian, 5% Black, 2% Mixed/Multiple and 4% other).
The proportion of BAME partners increased from 13% to 19%, which the SRA said primarily reflected the increase in the proportion of Asian partners.
Strikingly, BAME lawyers ran 42% of firms with a sole principal, compared to 26% in 2015, and made up 24% of partners in firms of two to five partners. However, only 9% of partners in the 50+ partner firms were BAME, up from 6% in 2015.
Firms whose main area of law was criminal or private client law both had a higher proportion of BAME lawyers, at 33% and 37% respectively, while litigation firms were below average at 18%.
Some 8% of lawyers declared a disability, up from 3% in 2015 but still well behind 17% in the wider UK workforce, while 7% of lawyers declared that their day-to-day activities were limited by a health condition or disability (up from 4%).
On social mobility, lawyers were significantly more likely to have come from a professional background (66% of lawyers compared with 46% nationally), although there has been a fall in the proportion of lawyers attending an independent/fee-paying school (23% in 2015 to 20% in 2025).
The largest firms had the lowest proportion of lawyers not from a professional background, while 30% of lawyers in firms whose main area of law was corporate law attended an independent/fee-paying school, compared with 11% of criminal lawyers and 13% of private client lawyers.
There was an increase in the proportion of lawyers who were lesbian, gay, bi or preferred another description, from 3% in 2015 to 4.5% in 2025.
The proportion of lawyers who had a gender identity that was different from their sex registered at birth in 2025 was 0.6%.
SRA chief executive Sarah Rapson said: “Encouraging diversity and inclusion within the legal sector is positive for consumers and for law firms alike.
“Consumers benefit from working with legal professionals that reflect their wider community, and firms thrive with talented professionals from different backgrounds in their firms.
“Whether we look at trends over the past 10 years or the most recent data, it is clear that while progress has been made, more can be done, in particular to address the barriers to progression for women and minority ethnic solicitors in larger firms, the underrepresentation of disabled solicitors, and to encourage those from less privileged backgrounds to progress in the profession.”