Growth in Female Lawyer Rankings in Africa
Diversity in the legal profession has been an area that Chambers started exploring a few years ago and continues to explore throughout the coming years. Gain an insight into diversity stats in the legal market across Africa.
Overall number of female lawyers is on the rise
Researchers now make greater efforts to speak to female lawyers to broaden the view of the market and we also ask your clients about the diversity & inclusion initiatives at law firms that they have worked with. Clients also put more and more emphasis on the importance of D&I and the ability to get a different perspective.
One of the things that we look at is gender diversity across our tables. We remain committed to promoting diversity within our guides and ensuring our rankings tables are reflective of the legal market. We also actively ask law firms to include gender statistic as part of the submission process and ask female lawyers to join our research calls.
In the images in the video, you can see how many female lawyers we ranked across the African jurisdictions in 2022 and how that changed in 2023.
I am delighted to say that in many African countries, the number of females in the rankings have grown, with South Africa leading the way.
We have added 10 new female lawyers into the tables there, and rankings in countries such as Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana have also seen an increase. Across all the jurisdictions in Africa, the overall number of female lawyers have gone up by 34, from 429 ranked in 2022 to 463 ranked in the 2023 edition of the Guide.