Diversity in Chambers Asia-Pacific Guide

At Chambers, we continue to track data on diversity and inclusion and seek to conduct our research in a way that allows us to identify the best legal talent.  

When it comes to gender balance, in the new release 24.7% of rankings across the guide are held by women. This percentage has been trending gradually upwards in the last few years, but there is still more work to be done.  

We remain committed to seeking out an equal mix of male and female partners to interview where this is possible, to allow us to continue to identify the best legal talent regardless of background or gender.  

Alongside this, we ask law firms to provide diversity data to us on a firm-wide basis each year, so we can continue to monitor the state of the market as it stands and use this to inform our own research. 

It is interesting to dig into the figures a little more by breaking down our rankings by gender across different jurisdictions.  

As you can see when you look beyond the regional average, there is a notable difference between those markets with the highest proportion of women ranked - which include some smaller jurisdictions such as Laos and Sri Lanka, with some larger markets such as New Zealand also above the regional average for the guide. 

The percentage of women ranked in some other key markets in the region such as Japan and South Korea remains lower than the regional average and we continue to work hard to ensure we are on the front foot when it comes to spotlighting new legal talent in these markets.    

We can also see huge variation when it comes to gender across practice areas. In this graph, we can see for instance that environment and planning has almost gender parity between men and women, whilst private equity is especially male-dominated with only 17% of rankings attained in this practice area belonging to women.