Chambers FinTech 2022 D&I Statement
The Chambers FinTech team share the Diversity & Inclusion statement for the 2022 edition of the guide.
What are the diversity stats for the Chambers FinTech 2022 guide and legal rankings?
Chambers FinTech 2022 features more than 500 ranked lawyers, a 29% year-on-year increase from the 2021 edition. Women make up 24% of these rankings, a proportion which has remained broadly static since the 2019 edition.
Given that FinTech law is a new and still somewhat loosely defined practice area, it is difficult to know how representative these rankings are of the wider market. Many of our ranked lawyers, particularly in less established FinTech markets, may not see themselves as 'FinTech lawyers' first and foremost; instead, they might consider themselves to be banking and finance specialists, PE/VC lawyers, financial services regulatory specialists or IT/IP practitioners, some of whose clients happen to be FinTechs or engaged in FinTech projects. This makes it difficult to gather whole-of-market data for lawyers working in the FinTech industry or on FinTech matters.
How will Chambers FinTech continue to raise awareness of Diversity & Inclusion in the FinTech market?
We are nonetheless disappointed not to have seen significant improvement in the proportion of rankings held by women in the latest edition of the Chambers FinTech guide. For the next round of research, the Chambers FinTech team aims to interview a gender-balanced split of lawyers in markets where we believe we can do so without limiting our research. The team has begun using a system of tracking exactly how many male and female lawyers our researchers invite for interview and how many they end up interviewing. We hope to be able to show you a breakdown of this data next year.
Looking more broadly at the FinTech industry these lawyers serve, we can see that there remains work to be done to ensure women are properly represented. Research by consultancy Oliver Wyman found that, in 2019, women made up just 14% of FinTech boards; HM Treasury data from 2017 suggests that women made up only 29% of the broader FinTech workforce in the UK.
Diversity & Inclusion is a core value of Chambers and Partners, and the Chambers FinTech team is committed to improving the representation of women in future editions of the guide.