Market insights into gender equality within the legal profession the Middle East

For several years now the Chambers submission template for Middle East, Africa, Caribbean, and Offshore has requested information on the percentage ratio of male/female lawyers within a given department.

Chambers also requests information on lawyers' responsibilities outside the firm as parents or carers. Disclosure of this data is always entirely voluntary, and has no direct bearing on ranking decisions, but is a useful way for the Chambers team to monitor gender equality within the legal profession and see how law firms are performing relative to their peers in this area of Diversity & Inclusion.

As an organisation, Chambers remains committed to the cause of Diversity and Inclusion within the legal market and has taken steps to promote the need for a diverse and inclusive legal community through various steps which include an intensive in-house training programme, a gender-balanced approach to lawyer interviews and an ongoing data capture project which seeks, via submissions, to collect data on the performance of ranked and unranked law firms across the globe in certain key areas of diversity and inclusion.

Alongside our bespoke submission template for Middle East research for the Chambers Global guide, the Chambers Global team have also begun requesting gender parity among our pool of law firm interviewees.

This means for every male lawyer we request an interview with a female lawyer will also receive a request. To start with, we will only take this approach with selected practice areas in our more developed markets, such as the UAE.

Ultimately, the aim is to break away from the gender bias implicit in a majority-male research pool, generating a high level of feedback on female lawyers and thus being able to include more women in our legal rankings.

The effects of this approach are visible in the 2022 rankings of Chambers Global. Across several Middle East markets, the percentage of women lawyers in the rankings had increased when compared with 2021.

The below data visualisations report on these findings from our research.

Bahrain continues to lead the way, with women representing some 35% of the overall number of ranked lawyers. The biggest increase however was in the UAE, where the percentage of female lawyers in the rankings jumped six percentage points from 13% in 2021 to 19% in 2022. This is unsurprising, as it the most-developed market in the region, as well as the one which has benefited most directly from our focus on diversity and inclusion.

The data presented above has been compiled using Chambers Business Intelligence which is a powerful tool beneficial to law firms of all sizes designed to provide a unique view of the global legal market with data to support business growth plans, identify areas of weakness and much more.

It is important to note that diversity will never be a reason for awarding a ranking, nor for having a ranking improve. Nonetheless, being aware that gender bias can be both latent as well as explicit and taking steps to counterbalance this within our research process, are important steps towards making our legal rankings more representative.

In its own small way, Chambers hopes that this recognition in turn encourages more women lawyers to remain in the profession, and that the profession itself continues to offer the right opportunities for women in terms of career progression.