Mentors crucial on law partnership route

Law is one profession that attracts considerable interest among the gender equity police.

Probably because women have entered law school in equal numbers to men for more than 20 years, are now the largest proportion being hired by the big law firms, but are still failing to reach partnership level in any significant numbers - a pattern mirrored in Britain and the USA.

With six of its 25 partners female, South Island firm Anderson Lloyd has the highest proportion of women partners of any other large firm.

At better known firms like Simpson Grierson, women comprise 18 per cent of the partners and at Russell McVeagh, 11 per cent.

Deborah Hollings, president of the Auckland Women Lawyers Association, cites a range of complex reasons for women's slow progress to partnership.

Partly it's because at the age partnership beckons, in the early 30s, women are choosing to take their last chance at having children.

Partly it's because law attracts women from privileged backgrounds to begin with, who are not always prepared to spend years of hard slog in junior positions to reach the top. Partly it's discrimination and a perception that men will be more authoritative in court than women.

But the big issue, she believes, is that young women lawyers are not nurtured in the same way as young men.

"Mentoring happens with the boys," she says, "not the girls."

So crucial is it, that the association runs its own mentoring programme by and for women lawyers.

Still, a young lawyer wanting a place at the partnership table needs someone there already promoting their cause.

Increasingly women lawyers are leaving the large firms to set up in sole practice where they have greater flexibility. But Hollings says they are still bypassed for the lucrative prestigious commercial cases.

For that reason Hollings specialises in matrimonial law, ironically making her name in the landmark case where the court ruled a wife was entitled to a proportion of her husband's future earnings.

The association is embarking on a campaign to persuade the Government to have its legal work done only by firms that have clearly demonstrated their commitment to equal employment opportunity.

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