Legal firm broke the mould and stood up for the age of diversity

Business won awards, all in a worthy cause finds Jonathan Bond

PINSENT Masons first made an appearance in Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index in 2007, the first law firm to do so.

In the ten years since, the firm has pursued a policy of inclusion for all staff working across 23 global offices and it was gratifying that in the latest 2017 Index, we remain the topperforming law firm in the UK.

Our focus on improving inclusion has included regularly gathering diversity data from our 2500 staff and each time we give people the option to tick “prefer not to say”. In 2007, 8 per cent of respondents chose this option when asked to describe their sexual orientation and that was a worrying figure. If people feel they can be themselves at work, why would they wish to withhold this information? When I joined the firm just over 10 years ago, it was clear Pinsent Masons was full of talented, focused people, but there was a conservative environment where people confirmed to old-fashioned norms. There was a lot of unrealised potential and I wanted to find a way to unleash that, but at first could not find the key to open that door.

One breakthrough moment came when I spoke to two openly gay senior partners, David Isaac and Adrian Barlow, about their own experiences. Both had taken the decision to be bold and open about their sexual orientation, but both had endured years of anxiety and uncertainty before doing so.

David put me in touch with Stonewall and encouraged me to look at whether we should be assessed for the Workplace Quality Index, the

list of top 100 gay-friendly employers in the UK. In the first year, we fell well short, but Stonewall provided detailed feedback on what we had to do to improve and this laid the foundations for the next decade and beyond.

It was a glorious moment when we became the first law firm to feature on the Index and each year we have built on this.

We are now the top-ranked law firm and second in the Index as a whole.

In the meantime, we have pushed forward with other strands of diversity. We now have six employee network groups, covering themes such as disability, women and BAME (Black Asian Minority Ethnic). Each group provides support to people who identify with their themes, providing a listening ear, a forum for policy consultation and focal point for networking internally and with clients.

A very important strand is Project Sky, a comprehensive programme to enhance gender balance at senior levels and across the partnership. Project Sky set a goal that 25 per cent of partners should be female by 1 May 2018 and we have already achieved this goal one year ahead of schedule.

The programme also introduced a “comply or explain” rule for each practice group to ensure each group’s shortlists for partner promotions were gender-balanced. Reciprocal mentoring, the pairing of rising star females with senior males, gives both sexes the opportunity to see the organisation through a different lens.

With this diversity programme in place, it is no co-incidence the firm is a leader for innovation and won the 2016 FT Innovative Lawyers Award. Jonathan Bond is Director of HR and Learning at Pinsent Masons