Highlighting The Top Women Lawyers in the Chambers Canada Guide
A key focus for the Chambers Canada guide both this year and last year was ensuring that our process engaged with diversity, specifically with regards to ensuring that we iron out any unconscious biases in the system and correctly recognize women professionals in our rankings.
Important progress in female representatives.
Last year, in an attempt to ensure a fair process, we have made a point of targeting as close to a 50/50 gender divide of specific lawyers we requested interviews with to discuss the market.
Last year 39% of our interview requests were with female lawyers, which dropped to 34% of eventual lawyer interviews being with women professionals. This year, our interview requests rose to being 43% with female lawyers and as a result, 36% of interviews were conducted with predominantly female representatives from firms. Though those rises are moderate, I believe it represents important progress, particularly when you consider that when you factor in all the calls where we accepted two lawyers on a call, one male and one female, the total proportion of lawyer calls that were either predominantly with female lawyers or balanced rises to 50%.
The eventual impact of this was that we continued to hear from a broader spread of market sources and thereby, it is hoped, avoid any unconscious echo-chamber effect that might limit progress in the rankings. Once again, we saw a marked jump in the rankings for female lawyers – the 2.9% increase to 28.4% exceeds the 2.7% increase last year and means that, across the past 6 editions of the guide, the representation of female lawyers in the guide has risen by over 10%.
Two further distinctions are noteworthy with regard to gender representation in the guide. The first is that though the number of female lawyers in the highest bands within tables does continue to grow, it still sits at just 23%, though again, this is up from 15% 6 years ago.
Furthermore, when you break down the rankings by province, we can see that though Ontario is outperforming the guide average, other provinces are not quite performing as strongly. A 5% year-on-year increase in British Columbia, along with 4% in Quebec and 3% in Alberta shows that progress is tracking in the right direction, but monitoring these trends over the next few guides will be important to ensure that we are correctly reflecting the full extent of talented lawyers in the market.
