Diversity Survey: Finding the balance | Latin Lawyer

Speculatively, the actual share of female partners in the wider region is likely smaller. Our diversity and inclusion survey targeted the largest and most successful firms across Latin America’s main cities. Outside of these, the reality is another. “If you get out of the big centres in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro – the figures are very different,” says BMA Advogados partner Barbara Rosenberg. She references a female mentee she had in Fortaleza, in northeastern Brazil, who, among other reasons, had moved from the city’s largest firm to another outfit because there was not a single woman in its partnership and having examples within the firm was important for her.

As partnerships remain male-dominated, it is no big surprise that there are very few women in the top leadership roles at law firms, with only 13% of managing partner positions held by women according to our research.

Similarly, female representation in law firm executive committees is also low. Over a fifth of firms say they have no female representation in their highest governing body, while nearly three quarters (74%) of outfits have less than 40% women in their executive committees.

Slow development

While law firms continue to lag behind corporate legal departments when it comes to women in leadership positions, the overall picture suggests steady but slow progress, meaning true gender equity may still take some time to achieve.

Most law firms tend to favour organic growth. Reaching greater gender balance in law firm partnerships that way – from a very male-dominated situation – is bound to take time.

“If you have a large pool of partners, it takes time to reach a balance between men and women,” says Ursula Ben-Hammou, counsel at Rodrigo, Elías & Medrano Abogados in Peru. “If a large firm wants to grow organically, it takes even longer,” she adds.

Law firms can help drive processes, by implementing policies addressing gender diversity and promoting equal opportunities, but change cannot happen overnight. María Lucila Winschel was elected as the first female executive committee member of Argentine firm Bruchou & Funes de Rioja (at the time named Bruchou, Fernández Madero & Lombardi) earlier this year. She explains that the firm began introducing policies encouraging greater gender diversity some 20 years ago, including motherhood support and flexible working. “My appointment to the executive committee is a sign of those efforts,” Winschel says. Since then, the firm has been finetuning and adding new policies to constantly improve its diversity framework. “You must give policies time to take effect to see the outcome of them,” Winschel adds.

Structural market conditions also impact how quickly firms move towards greater gender diversity and also explain differences in progress between jurisdictions. For example, publicly listed companies tend to have stronger corporate governance structures and higher transparency requirements than private businesses, as they face greater scrutiny from public stakeholders, including investors, shareholders and creditors. This has a trickle-down effect, meaning publicly listed companies must be more transparent in their law firm procurement processes and are more likely pushed by internal and external stakeholders to consider gender diversity when hiring external counsel.

According to Cristina Massa, partner at González Calvillo, SC, Mexico’s relatively small stock market explains why the country is behind other large Latin American markets, such as Brazil, when it comes to gender diversity in the corporate world. “In Mexico, most big companies are privately held, family run and traditional – they don’t push for gender diversity at firms before they decide who to hire,” she says.

The Mexican stock exchange, BMV, has around 140 companies listed, which compares to some 2,300 companies floating on the B3 stock exchange in São Paulo. “Overall, this may be one reason why Brazil is significantly more advanced than many other Latin American countries when it comes to gender diversity,” says Massa.

A comparison of the average female partner number between the two countries shows that Brazilian firms have 32% female partners, while Mexican firms have 10% – the lowest in the region.

Getting to the root

There is no doubt that law firms want to become more diverse. The argument for it is simple and widely researched, more diverse teams bring different perspectives and better solutions. Yet, many obstacles remain, slowing progress down.

To deal with the issue, firms have developed plenty of policies addressing gender diversity over the years. According to our survey, the most widely established policy is flexitime for lawyers. Besides that, nearly half of outfits say they have committees for women, while almost 45% have mentoring programmes in place for female lawyers.

Providing the right training and support for talented lawyers on their way to the partnership is key to prepare them for leadership roles. Given that the age at which many lawyers are considered for a partnership position coincides with the age in which women also tend to start a family, firms must ensure they have a model and culture in place that supports women and men in their dual career and family responsibilities. “At partner level, you start losing female lawyers,” says Gómez-Pinzón partner Natalia García Arenas. “It’s a shame, because you’ve trained them for so long.” In many cases, according to García, it’s likely a combination of family factors and burnouts, making female lawyers think law firms are not for them. “You need women to want to become partners, and as a firm you need the policies to accommodate that,” García argues.

Law firm role models can help facilitate the process. “It gives young lawyers more confidence and also shows that a firm as an institution can have female partners,” says García. As an aspect of that, firms often rely on mentorship programmes to pair up young lawyers with senior counterparts. “As female partners, we try to empower the young female lawyers, making them believe they can climb up to the same roles as us,” says Roberta Gallardo, partner at Arias (El Salvador).

Flexitime is praised by many as a key policy to help foster gender diversity at law firms. For example, Colombia’s Gómez-Pinzón has a flexitime policy to ease mothers back into work after maternity leave. The policy permits lawyers to work at 50% for up to a year, while keeping 85% of their salary. “It makes you feel more prepared for when you return, while you also feel you’ve been around for your child,” says García.

While flexitime is useful, García underscores that firms must be careful not to sanction lawyers that use it. Other female lawyers agree. “I think flexible work is amazing, but we need to be aware of the potential complications it brings, says Ben-Hammou, adding that “it certainly needs to be paired with cultural change at home and at the office, especially in Latin America.” As lawyers return to the office and economies start growing again, firms expect lawyers to be visible and to do the big work again. “But if women are taking the bigger load at home, they cannot perform on the same level as male lawyers. Teamwork at home is also essential for female lawyers to be able to keep growing at the office, and firms play a part in facilitating that change,” Ben-Hammou argues.

In more traditional cultures where women oversee more of the domestic and childcare duties, which is often the case in Latin America, policies tend to be aimed more at women. By the same token, lawyers that do not take advantage of the flexitime policies and that work on the big deals and put in longer hours tend to be considered more for promotions. “This means women miss out on the big deals that require the long hours,” says Diana Pineda Esteban, partner at González Calvillo.

Unconscious bias also plays a big role in perpetuating inequality and discrimination in the workplace. “Internal biases at firms – which we all have – have a great impact,” says Ben-Hammou, adding that it is not uncommon for partners to make assumptions that female lawyers want to slow down when they have kids and are therefore not even asked to work on a complicated project. They think they are helping the female lawyer, which may be the case for some, but certainly not for others, Ben-Hammou comments.

Rosenberg agrees, referring to the existing unconscious bias about the profile of women. “Women that are too strong, they’re seen as aggressive, while an equivalent among men is seen as a firm person,” Rosenberg argues. “For this reason, identifying unconscious bias is such an important tool for diversity and inclusion”

Dealing with unconscious bias is no easy task and requires training and awareness. One way in which firms can provide this is through organisation-wide workshops or training sessions particularly tailored for partners in management.

Some policies may also have an indirect positive impact on unconscious bias – paternity leave for example. Firms have been offering extended maternity leave for a long time, but the equivalent for men is a much newer concept. Chilean firm Carey introduced a policy in 2021 that extended the paternity leave from the 5 days protected by law to 30 days in total. The initiative seeks to encourage parental co-responsibility, explains managing partner Jaime Carey. “It helps to send the message that both female and male associates have other responsibilities and thus, the career of women should not be jeopardised because of those responsibilities,” he said.

Levelling out parental leave between men and women also means men are away from work for longer period of times. “Women must be away when becoming a mother, they may also want to be, but neither do they have a choice,” Pineda says. “If firms don’t have paternity leave policies, they will never resolve the unconscious bias that occurs when partners select male lawyers over their women counterparts for a deal or promotion just because they assume women will eventually be away from work,” she argues. 

Additionally, extended paternity leave is about guaranteeing male lawyers the right to also step away from work and spend time with their children. “All this talk about gender diversity, but we still see firms that don’t focus on men as part of their diversity strategy. For instance, many firms give men as little as one to three days of paternity leave – how can that be?” comments Ben-Hammou. “Parental policies are fundamental, for both men and women, and if we don’t change the mindset of people, it will be difficult to see more female attorneys in leadership roles.”

Accelerating parity  

Formal policies targeting gender diversity make a difference, according to lawyers, but they also require regular fine-tuning, and their results take time to see. One way in which to accelerate change, therefore, can be quotas.

Gómez-Pinzón’s García thinks quotas can be useful, particularly for firms that have few or no female partners. “Sometimes you really need to see one female partner or two to start making the change,” she says. “It is also difficult to attract female lawyers at any position if you have no female partners – why would they want to join your firm?” García explains.

Some firms, including Gómez-Pinzón, have earmarked a seat on the executive committee for a female representative. With that strategy, there is always one woman involved when executive committees devise new policies. Additionally, when electing new managing partners, they regularly come from the executive committee or have previous experience from that body. Brazil’s Veirano Advogados changed the structure of its executive committee some years ago to have one mandatory seat for women. Veirano partner Ana Teresa Caetano argues that some specific actions, like this one, may help accelerate gender diversity in firms. Veirano is currently the only Brazilian Elite firm with a female leader. Paula Surerus took on the managing partner role in January 2022, after two years on the firm’s executive committee.

However, quotas remain a controversial issue. “Establishing quotas may damage the reputation of the women that hold senior roles,” says Bruchou’s Winschel, adding that “we want to base promotions on merit.” Fellow Bruchou partner and executive committee member José Bazán argues that it is more important to provide lawyers with the right tools to reach the top and a transparent career track. “Transparency is key in retaining talent and we have developed intelligence for how to create a better environment for evaluations and promotions,” he says.     

It is true, transparency around promotions is important to lawyers at law firms. In Latin Lawyer’s parallel diversity and inclusion survey directed at law firm staff, less than 50% of respondents said that their firms displayed transparent promotion processes, while another 23% said their firms have somewhat transparent promotion processes. Law firms should guarantee they have transparent career tracks, or they may face the risk of losing valuable talent.

What next?

Law firms clearly still have work to do to reach greater gender diversity in their partnerships, but the key is to be realistic when it comes to setting targets. Instead of establishing a set number of male and female lawyers that must be promoted, it can be easier to start by making sure there is an equal number of male and female lawyers among the candidates. “The best one should obviously be promoted, but I have the intuition that just making female candidates more visible, will make a huge difference both in the promotions themselves and the assessment process,” Ben-Hammou says.

Brazil’s BMA already applies a rule like that. “We included in our policy that our executive committee should have a gender balance,” says Rosenberg, explaining that the importance is not to have a fifty-fifty split, but to make sure that there is diversity in the governing body.

As male partners will likely continue to lead law firms for the near future at least, it is also key for women to have allies among their male colleagues. “We are dependent on male allies for virtually all diversity and inclusion policies that we have put in place,” says González Calvillo’s Massa. In firms with no female seniority, progress in this area is too slow. “Those firms may have many female lawyers that really care about these topics, but they find it hard to get much done,” she explains.  

Firms may also have to reassess how they evaluate candidates. “We must tackle the visibility issue and how we measure talent for those who become partners,” says Ben-Hammou. “Male lawyers will be in the office every day and will be ahead of women that take flexibility,” she adds. In her view, there is no silver bullet, firms must broaden the traditional evaluation method based on billable hours to cover other things, such as project management, business development and client retention, to adapt to the new flexible working environment. 

“There is still a lot of road to walk to reach a fairer working environment, we are all learning in the process,” says Ben-Hammou.