Law Society of Scotland reports 21% gender pay gap

The Law Society of Scotland has reported its gender pay gap for the first time.

The median pay gap between men and women at the organisation is 21% in favour of men. The Law Society has 127 employees, the majority of whom, at 71%, are female. The mean pay gap is 17% in favour of men.

A breakdown of staffing levels showed there are 17 women and 15 men in the top quartile at the Law Society. While there are more women than men in the top quartile, this represents 19% of all female staff. Men make up 29% of the total workforce, but represent 46% of the top quartile.

Just over half, at 54%, of female Law Society staff have roles within the lower and lower middle quartiles, whereas 37% of male staff work in those quartiles.

Lorna Jack, chief executive of the Law Society of Scotland, said: “We are committed to championing gender equality. While we have fewer than 250 employees and are not legally required to report, we are choosing to publish our gender pay gap because we recognise that achieving gender equality in the workplace is important. Working towards gender equality in the workplace  is everyone’s responsibility and should not be viewed as an issue that only concerns women - we all benefit.

“As a smaller organisation, even limited changes in personnel could result in substantial fluctuations but we intend to work towards reducing our gender pay gap. We have committed  to undertaking unconscious bias training for all our managers this year and are examining how we can use our well-received mentoring programme for solicitors to benefit our staff team at the Law Society.

“We will continue to be agile in our approach to career paths within the organisation and ensure we promote flexible working to all staff, which can be taken up by those who have caring responsibilities or want to pursue other interests and opportunities outside work. When we recruit new members of staff we will measure the gender breakdown of applications at each stage of the recruitment process.”

The Law Society published updated guidance on equality and diversity for the legal profession, which sets out 10 voluntary equality standards for law firms, including publication of the gender pay gap for firms with more than 150 employees.

Lorna Jack added: “We have been encouraging law firms to adopt our equality standards, which include developing an equality strategy for their organisation, providing staff training on equality and diversity in addition to publishing their gender pay gap . It makes sense for us to do the same.”

This year the organisation will undertake a profession-wide equality and diversity census. Read more about our equality and diversity work.