The proportion of women among the workforces at the country’s leading law firms continues to edge upwards in line with the wider profession but recently filed gender pay gap reports suggest the rate at which they are being integrated into the companies’ higher echelons remains slow.
All but one of the country’s six largest employers of solicitors – Matheson, A&L Goodbody, Arthur Cox, McCann FitzGerald, Mason Hayes & Curran and William Fry – with about 1,700 between them – recorded a pay gap that favoured men during their reporting period for 2025.
That was William Fry, the smallest of the Big Six, which recorded a gap of -1.0 per cent, the minus signifying that women earned more per hour on average than their male colleagues. The range of pay gaps among the other firms was between 1.0 per cent at Arthur Cox and 16.2 per cent at Matheson, one of the largest firms in terms of solicitors employed, which has consistently returned the highest mean figure for staff over the past three years.
The average gap increased by about 2 percentage points across the Big Six when compared with the corresponding figures for 2023, from 6.5 per cent to 8.5 per cent.
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Some progress is seen when it comes to equity partners, who are not counted as employees but rather the owners of the firms and therefore not paid a salary.
When included in the figures for all employees – something the firms are not required to produce but nevertheless do, citing a desire for transparency – the pay gaps recorded jump to between 37 per cent at William Fry and 58 per cent at both A&L Goodbody and Arthur Cox.
The average figure, however, now stands at 51.8 per cent, down from 55 per cent two years ago.
It is important to note that the gender pay gap figures do not suggest employees being paid more for doing the same work as a colleague of a different gender; that would be illegal. Rather, the figures provide a sense of how well represented each gender is at different levels of an organisation.
In the big law firms, women generally make up a majority of employees across the board, about two thirds, with the latest reports suggesting they comprise between 61 and 74 per cent of the less well-paid staff and 50 to 68 per cent of the highest-paid.
But at ownership and the most senior decision-making levels of the firms, things look somewhat different.
The proportion of partners who are women is consistently below 50 per cent, sometimes very significantly so, and while all of the firms have been making clear their determination to address this in their reports over the past three to four years, the rate of progress remains slow.
In some instances, there is a lack of clarity as to whether partners referred to are exclusively equity partners or include salaried partners, who do not hold equity and are considered employees, albeit very senior ones, of the company.
Generally, the proportion of women equity partners across the sector is put at about 37 per cent.
From what is revealed in the gender pay gap reports, the rate of change is both slow and uneven.
Arthur Cox reveals that 35 per cent of its equity partners were women this year, a significant increase on the 27 per cent recorded in 2022. Progress on the cohort the firm classifies more generally as partners has been slower during that time, however, shifting by just one percentage point, from 40 to 41.
In 2023, William Fry said 39 per cent of its partners were women, while 38 per cent of its senior leadership, a group that includes both partners and members of its executive and management committees, were women. Two years on, those figures appear to have simply flipped, now reading 38 and 39 per cent respectively.
McCann Fitzgerald put its proportion of women equity partners at 30 per cent in 2022 and this year says it is 36 per cent, again a significant increase, one it attributes in part to the fact that 43 per cent of new partner promotions/hires during the year were women, although the pool is pretty small, just 14.
At Mason Hayes & Curran, the report puts the figure for women solicitors at 60 per cent and the proportion of partners at 43 per cent.
“Our female talent pipeline remains strong as 66 per cent of the overall firm demographic is female, as are 43 per cent of partners and 59 per cent of fee earners, and 68 per cent of all hires in the reporting period were female,” says managing partner William Carmody in his commentary.
With regard to the rate of progress, however, it is worth noting that the partner figure was 44 per cent last year and 43 per cent in 2023.
While the general trend is upward, or positive, parity appears to remain some way off.
Similarly, the more general pay gap figures, for all employed staff, suggest a lack of consistent progress.
At McCann Fitzgerald, for instance, the figures for 2022 to 2025 are 8.7 per cent, 13.7 per cent, 9.0 per cent and 14 per cent respectively. Matheson and William Fry have shifted slightly in favour of men in each of the past couple of years.
There can be many factors that contribute to this, often benign, such as the fact that where figures are provided they indicate significant expansion and hiring by the firms in recent years. As a majority of the new roles are relatively junior and a majority of new hires tend to be women, this increases their representation among the lower-paid ranks and so impacts negatively on the overall gender pay figure.
McCann FitzGerald provides a particularly detailed breakdown across the various roles in the firm. It shows that at consultant/director/head of function level, the numbers are evenly split, with seven apiece, but below that the predominance of women starts to show, with 111 women solicitors (including salaried partners) compared to 88 men and 76 women trainees compared to 60 men.
At legal executive/project assistant level it is 37 versus seven and among business support workers/secretaries and legal administrators the respective numbers are 110 to 41 ... a similar sort of percentage in that last instance, as it happens, to the general dominance of men at other ends of the financial scale.
All of the Big Six emphasise in their various commentaries on their reports that they are working hard to shift the dial.
Mentorship programmes, hybrid working and other family-friendly policies are among the most commonly cited measures across the six reports, with many firms interacting with outside organisations in order to tap into expertise with regard to policy measures and supports.
Sometimes, even this serves to highlight the issues they face, however, with the Irish chapter of the 30% Club, a global organisation that promotes women’s representation at board and senior executive level, listing the representatives of the six firms on its website. Just one of the eight representatives of the Big Six is a woman – Arthur Cox chair Ailish Finnerty.
Among the organisations mentioned in the reports is the Professional Women’s Network (PWN), to which William Fry is affiliated.
Maria Souza, president of its Dublin branch, which also works with the likes of Irish Rail, State Street, the ESB, Mercer and Citi, acknowledges that the pace of change is slow but believes the commitment of firms is clear and genuine.
“There are many things that can be done,” she says, “but the first thing is to be honest about the current situation. The law firms are not obliged to publish the figures for partners but they are doing so and that shows a level of integrity. Still, it is very clear from those figures that a level of cultural change is required.”
A key issue, she suggests, is the demanding nature of the work at these firms.
“There has tended to be a 24/7 approach and if you continue to require people to work that 24/7 approach then we are not going to see the type of change that is desirable any time soon,” she says.
“What we need is a pathway to promotion that is not based on working very long hours, on a grind, but rather on your impact as a leader – that’s what will make change possible.
“Men have a lot to gain here because both genders gain when there is real equality. In their case, they won’t have to carry the same burden of responsibility.”
Mark Garrett, director general of the Law Society, also believes things are changing but acknowledges that the pace remains slow.
“It’s certainly something that is of concern within the profession, and it’s something that we can see the firms themselves have highlighted ... they’re saying that they need to be more proactive and we would agree with that.
“But there is a lot changing in the profession and there’s a significant growth in the choices available now to people because in the multinational sector, the public sector and the private sector, there has been a growth in the number of opportunities for people to have legal careers outside the traditional law firm model.”
He cites the dramatic growth in the number of solicitors employed in-house by non-legal firms, 66 per cent of them women.
In terms of the public sector, four of the next five largest employers of solicitors after the Big Six firms are the Chief State Solicitor’s Office, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Legal Aid Board and the Central Bank of Ireland, with almost 600 employed between them.
In the wider profession, he says, it is just over a decade since the number of female solicitors became equal to the number of male ones, with the proportion now 54 to 46 per cent in favour of women. In terms of those studying to become solicitors at the Law Society, the percentage of women has increased from 58 per cent in 2015 to 66 per cent now.
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The Law Society, however, puts the proportion of women equity partners at the big firms at about 37 per cent overall, up from 30 per cent around a decade ago. So progress is being made, he says, but it is too slow.
“The numbers aren’t yet reflecting the female majority, but certainly they have grown. And while in the past the career path for people was pretty limited – you had to work in a firm, whether that be small or large, and if you weren’t on the partner track then you were seen as somebody who wasn’t going to the top – now there are a lot more choices,” Garrett says.
Alison Hodgson, director of CIPD Ireland, also believes that the rate of progress has been slow and firms have more to do, although she notes that it is not limited to employers in the legal sector.
“I think culture is a core part of any organisation’s success, regardless of sector,” she says. “I think it’s about more than just accommodating. It’s about embracing the differences. And in a world where we are 24/7, where we can, if we choose to, be always on, remembering that in some instances at least we can work at times that suit us and our lifestyles better, both for men and women.
“Organisations probably need to start thinking about how they can play more of a part there, embracing everybody’s different ways of working. There is no silver bullet to this, though,” says Hodgson. “It is about how you recruit, and from the very beginning throwing the net wide enough to make sure that everybody feels like they can apply, join and be successful.
“It is about thinking about how you approach this particular challenge in a way that makes sure that you, as an organisation, get the best talent that is out there, and then, when you have that talent, you get the best from them.”
