It's raining men at A&O Shearman (and BigLaw)

Rachel, could you give us a recap of what the story is and about the, the issue of female leadership within A&O Sherman?

So the story from this month is about their board elections.

They, they had a number of candidates, uh, for a number of positions on the board because people had served out their terms and, uh, The Lawyer understands that one woman made the cut.

She was actually on it before, so she's been re- reelected onto the board, which is great.

She's called Alice Engelhart, and she's in their disputes team.

Uh, but of the other places that were up for grabs, they did not go to women, even though women did put themselves forward, and we understand that that's led to quite a lot of disappointment among some of the ranks that some of those roles didn't go to senior women who might have been really, really good on the board.

So at the moment, A&O just has one woman out of nine places on the board.

But that's a slightly smaller board compared to what it was before, so that might change.

But why is this interesting? This is interesting because this isn't a new thing at A&O Sherman or at Legacy A&O really, which is what we've been covering.

Um, as you referred to earlier when you introved this podcast, uh, I remember Kat's leader from 2015, which was...

I'm sure she can speak more about soon.

But what I remember was, uh, going into A&O to see their leadership at the time, Wim De Jong and Andrew Bulheamer, and they said to me, and we wrote a story about it, that they expected their promotions over the following two years to be rubbish for women.

They did not use the phrase rubbish, but that was essentially what it was, and they were pretty rubbish.

As we wrote a story the next year where there was two women out of 20 promotions worldwide that made the cut, which is not good, and they knew they were not gonna be good, so they were getting ahead of that, which fair play to them.

So this isn't a new issue.

This has been a long one running, running underneath the surface at A&O that, um, the leadership at the time wanted to change, and there have, there have been changes, you know.

So I don't want anyone at A&O to think we- we're still sort of having a go at them for this, but, you know, there have, there have been improvements.

But I think it's fair to say, Rachel, that we're not creating a story out of nothing here.

There-- You know, one of the reasons that we picked this up is that actually there was, you know, The Lawyer understands widespread disappointment amongst many of the female candidates for these roles, um, and that, you know, uh, the fact that there was only one w- one woman who, uh, who got elected simply turns the spotlight back onto the process by which women exceed to management positions in professional services firms.

Because the fact is, and this is something I wrote back in 2015 [chuckles] which is, if you make it a contested election, women are much less likely to stand.

They don't want to put themselves forward.

I mean, actually, in the intervening decade, it's even harder for women now, and I'm not doing an, oh, woe is me, by the way because these women in professional services are tough cookies and, you know, they, they don't need hand-holding by any means.

Um, but the fact is, is that out there now is a whole torrent of misogynistic abuse, um, online, so this isn't quite the same.

This is not for political office.

But there is, there is a feeling that if you put your head over the parapet, then, you know, you're gonna get judged sometimes actually by your fellow women sometimes.