This week at Ignition Law, we are joining in the collective action around International Women’s Day to think about what we can all do to challenge stereotypes, fight bias, broaden perceptions, improve situations and celebrate women’s achievements.
Gender equality continues to be an issue within the legal industry. In a recent survey amongst 700 women, only 2% think there is true equality for women with 80% predicting it will take at least 20 years to achieve.
So it is more important than ever for all of us who work in the legal services industry to take collective action and work out what we can do to play a part in creating a gender equal world.
At Ignition Law, we have made agile working central to working life for all our lawyers. Our lawyers know the working environment that suits them best and that this can change daily. To us, it doesn’t matter when or where our lawyers do their work. Our objective is solving our clients’ issues and offering them the best service. So we encourage all our lawyers to find an environment where they can feel happy and work productively.
Diversifying our workforce and advocating flexible working has empowered many of our highly skilled female lawyers return to work after career breaks to raise families and a large proportion of our team are female lawyers who have worked in leading law firms and who now work for us on an agile basis. We are able to give our female lawyers high level involvement in exciting and meaningful work for our start-up clients. Enabling agile working has helped us to attract and retain some of the best legal talent.
Whilst there are many others in the legal profession who advocate such ways of working which is great progress, more firms could adopt this successful way of mobilizing their workforce. This plays a part in retaining not only senior women looking to balance their careers with family commitments, but working parents in general and other individuals who require flexibility in line with life demands.
We are also proud of the female founded businesses we have been lucky enough to work with. From soft drinks company Nix and Kix, to innovative hosiery company Hedoine and concept beauty store Seekology, championing female founded start-ups and supporting them along their business journey is something we hope to expand upon into our next phase of growth. We especially recognise those VCs looking to diversify the start-ups in their portfolios to include more female founded start-ups. We truly believe in the strong ROI of investing in diverse start-ups.
So this International Women’s Day, we are joining in #eachforequal by recognising two of the ways that we work towards gender equality at Ignition Law and considering what further steps we can take. Let the action around awareness and creating gender parity be about more than just one day. Let’s aim to take action every single day. As a business we pledge to keep striving for better gender equality in our profession and hope one day very soon, to see some of the stats change for the better.
If you are a lawyer looking to join a team who harnesses the power of agile working, contact us on info@ignition.law
If you are a start-up, scale-up or entrepreneur looking for legal team who understands the journey you are on, contact us on info@ignition.law
