The legal arena is not transformed yet

People of colour and women are still not reaching career pinnacles in the broader legal profession in numbers that allow us to say the system has been transformed.

Despite the many legal requirements in place to ensure more diversity across the economy and despite the increase in black and female law graduates over the past 30 years, the legal profession is still predominantly white and male.

For example, the Law Society of SA reported that in 2017, 59% of bachelor of laws graduates were African, yet in the same year 61% of admitted attorneys were male and 58% white, 25% African, 9% Asian and 5% coloured, with 2% “unknown”.

Also in 2017, advocates were 63% white and 37% black. Why? It’s not as though we haven’t been trying.

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First, there are the many requirements of South Africa’s transformation legislation to be met – the Employment Equity Act, the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act and Codes, the Skills Development Levies Act and the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act.

Very many of us in the legal and corporate spheres truly want to see young people, and especially young black people, flourish.

Paving the way for change

The good news is that after two years of discussions the SA General Counsel for Diversity & Inclusion (GC for DI) was founded in 2019 and officially launched to the industry in 2023, to foster greater diversity, equity and inclusion in the legal profession.

This initiative gives us the impetus and support we need to meet this challenging task. I cannot point to anyone, the world over, who has met this task perfectly, but as long as we keep challenging ourselves and making progress, we have hope.

If we meet this mission well, we will make our profession richer and stronger. Diversity is good for business. Global management consulting firm McKinsey conducted a survey across 15 countries involving more t 1 000 large companies.

The findings are a solid argument for diversity. Companies ranking in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to boast above-average profitability compared to their counterparts in the lowest quartile in 2019.

McKinsey’s research revealed an intriguing trend: the higher the diversity, the greater the chances of outperforming competitors.

Companies with more than 30% female executives were notably more likely to outshine those with a 10% to 30% range which, in turn, surpassed those with fewer or no female executives.

McKinsey’s report Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters, published in May 2020, underscores this point.

The story doesn’t end with gender diversity; ethnic and cultural diversity also pack a punch in the business world. According to the McKinsey survey, in 2019 companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity outperformed those in the bottom quartile by 36% in terms of profitability.

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There is no silver bullet for transformation in any profession, but the South African legal and corporate professions are not alone.

GC for DI has taken a lot of inspiration from the European General Counsel for Diversity & Inclusion, which counts among its signatories Anglo American, Airbus, BAE Systems, Diageo, FedEx Express, Heineken, L’Oreal, Rio Tinto, Unilever and Wellcome.

We established GC for DI after it became clear from the numbers that attempts to drive transformation in the corporate and legal sectors were not as effective as we would have liked. The legal profession needed to face up to the often-overlooked barriers that people of colour and women face.

Together, we needed to do more, better and deeper work to ensure greater diversity in our sector. It was also clear that we needed to band together to do this.

There is that famous African proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

We want to go far. We want to one day observe a truly transformed profession. Ensuring diversity means giving everyone an equal opportunity, but this can be a confusing notion.

People come from different backgrounds and levels of privilege. If you want to give everyone an equal chance, you have to take their backgrounds into account.

Different life experiences

For example, a young woman who qualifies as an attorney after growing up in a rural part of the Eastern Cape and going to a local school will have a very different life experience, expectations and approach to working in a big city law firm than her fellow candidate attorneys who grew up in Johannesburg and went to a private school before also qualifying as an attorney.

Ensuring a level playing field needs to continue throughout an individual’s career.

People’s backgrounds affect the way they approach their job and behave at work. Ensuring diversity at work requires creating a space in which each individual feels they belong. It is, in a word, complicated.

Added to this is bias, especially unconscious bias, which we all have. When we pick teams, we tend to choose people we relate to. It is a natural thing to do, but it leads to exclusion.

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We need a framework that helps us rise above our unconscious biases and that’s where GC for DI comes in.

It is there to provide the frameworks and the support needed to realise genuine equity. This is difficult, but essential.

When you have a diverse team, you have more perspectives, ideas and solutions. Your team’s work will be richer and stronger.

GC for DI is working to improve diversity in the corporate and legal professions through increasing gender diversity, including people from the LGBTQI+ community; by creating more space for people with disabilities; and through bringing in more race and ethnicity-based diversity, among other considerations fully captured in the constitution.

• Chimwaradze is general counsel: Africa, Unilever