Women in Law Pledge

Yes. It’s excellent if you’re already making a start on ensuring all genders are treated equally, offered equal opportunities and paid the same for the same roles, but there are more ways you can ensure positive change within your organisation.

Our roundtables and the support network of other signatories can help you to develop policy and culture changes which will contribute to gender equality even further.

If you feel there are very few extra changes you can realistically make, making the commitment is still vital for progress to happen across the whole sector.

Sharing not only your commitment, but current policies and your plans to build on them through our roundtables, means your organisation can act as a role model and inspiration for the rest of the profession. This is just as vital to ensuring real, meaningful change takes place for gender equality.

The insight you have into your organisation’s policies, culture and inner workings is crucial to developing impactful goals. We believe that this understanding is one of the key components for realising real progress, so we have intentionally not been prescriptive about the contents of these aims.

We encourage you to set targets which are ambitious yet realistic and appropriate for your organisation and where you are on your gender equality journey.

We recommend they include a mix of numerical goals, such as percentage of partner split and timescale to achieve this, and cultural goals, like flexible working policies and implementing staff networks, which also address intersectionality and inclusivity within your organisation.

Further suggestions and examples can be found in the accompanying guidance.

We understand it can be challenging to get senior buy in for new projects. We recommend first deciding how the pledge can be complementary to both your gender and diversity and inclusion workplan, and how it may be easily integrated into it.

For example, some signatories have simply transferred their existing short and long term goals for gender equality into the pledge.

They have then used the pledge as a tool for accountability and acceleration in achieving these goals, since the pledge is a public initiative.

This has created little to no extra work for those leading on the pledge and can be helpful in demonstrating how the pledge can help you succeed.

If you have offices based in England and Wales and also international locations, you can still sign up from your UK based office. This excludes Scotland and Northern Ireland.

We do not currently support international signatories (including Scotland and Northern Ireland) under the Women in Law Pledge.

You may include targets within your submission which impact all global locations of your organisation – for example, percentage of women partners across all of your offices.

No. Submissions are only seen by relevant internal staff at the Law Society and are not shared externally or made publicly available.

The only documentation which we require you to make public are your targets and action plan. You should publish this on your website as soon as possible, but within one year of committing to the pledge.

A member of our Diversity and Inclusion Team will contact you after one year to confirm this has been done.

If you wish to share your submission document, you may do so, but it is not compulsory.

You’ll receive an email confirming we have received your submission along with an outline of what signing the pledge means.

Our Diversity and Inclusion Team will then ensure you are invited to the next virtual roundtable.

You will also be contacted to respond to the annual survey which will feed into the annual pledge report (aggregate statistics only). This will be published on our website.

You will need to publish your targets and action plan as soon as possible but within one year of committing to the pledge.

A member of our Diversity and Inclusion Team will contact you after one year to confirm this has been done.

We think disclosing your organisation’s commitment to the pledge is beneficial for a number of reasons.

Within your organisation, it’s a clear message that you have pledged to improve the environment for women within the profession and are committed to gender equality.

Some signatories have posited their pledge targets on their internal intranet. This is an easy and effective way to make all staff aware of what’s on your gender agenda.

You may also want to share why you felt it was important to sign up to the pledge and what effect you hope it will have on your employees and your organisation.

As stated in point 7 of the pledge, we ask that you make public that your organisation has signed up. You may do this in the way best suited to your organisation.

All signatories are shown on our Women in Law Pledge webpage and we announce all new signatories on our Diversity and Inclusion Team’s Twitter page shortly after you sign up. You are welcome to share either of these. 

You might like to add the following text to your website or share it on your social media channels:

“We are proud signatories to the Women in Law Pledge created by the Law Society, the Bar Council of England and Wales and the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEx). Our organisation is committed to the progress of gender equality, elimination of gender discrimination and pledges to make positive change for the legal profession.”

You can download our template (Word 280 KB).

Guidance on effective action planning is provided in the Women in Law Pledge Guidance (PDF 1 MB).

Please note that the pledge guidance material is currently under review. Reference to previous reporting methods should be disregarded as they have been replaced with the above process. In addition the Law Society Diversity and Inclusion Charter has been replaced with the Diversity and Inclusion Framework.