Diversity of the Judiciary 2024 – Part I: Gender & ethnicity

Every year, the Ministry of Justice publishes an annual Diversity of the Judiciary report. 

It is the most comprehensive analysis of the legal market in the United Kingdom, and it gives us a real insight into what is going on regarding attempts to diversify what is seen as a traditional and potentially old-fashioned profession. This year’s report has just been published, so we thought it was well worth diving into the headline stats and seeing precisely what the results are saying about the judiciary at the moment.  

Looking at women in law, the report finds incredibly favourably for this group and shows some significant progress has been made to be more inclusive towards them. 40% of barristers, 53% of solicitors, 77% of Chartered Legal Executives and 43% of judges identified as female – for three of these categories, this is an increase on last year’s numbers, while for the remaining group, the number has stayed the same. (This being the number of Chartered Legal Executives.) The report's findings are favourable for this group, with the statistician’s comments finding that women are generally well-represented throughout the legal sector. However, it does comment that, at the higher levels, there is less representation of women. 

In terms of diversity of ethnicity, the numbers are, according to the comment, in line with the national population of working age, with 17% of barristers, 19% of solicitors, 11% of Chartered Legal Executives and 11% of judges coming from an ethnic minority. All these figures have jumped from where they were in 2014, and while they might look low on the surface, it’s essential to consider how they are balanced against the national population average. Again, like with women, the higher the legal structure, the thinner representation is. However, there’s still plenty of positive news from these results, as steps are clearly being taken to bring more diverse voices into law from looking at these figures.  

We also thought it was worth exploring what our salary survey had to say about the legal sector for women and see if there were any points of comparison with this survey. One clear thing was that this is a very ambitious group – 60% of respondents had aspirations to reach partner level in their careers, while 86% believed they would still be in the legal sector in 5 years. Despite this optimism for reaching the top levels, only 45% thought they could do it at their current firm, with over 25% confident they wouldn’t. The main reasons given included not wanting the stress that comes with such a role (the most popular reason given, at 30%), a lack of interest (17%), and the structure of the firm (14%), all of which seem to be common factors across the board in our latest survey. 

However, like with the findings of the MoJ’s Diversity of the Judiciary report, it does seem that women are making inroads into the highest levels of law more so than ever before.  

The report also discusses other areas, such as age, disability, social mobility, and sexual orientation, which we will discuss in a future blog. However, this report clearly shows a definite shift towards the legal sector being much more representative of the United Kingdom as a whole. Here at Douglas Scott, we will continue to monitor these throughout the year, especially when we release our yearly salary survey.