Susana Berlevy

Gender pay gap reporting was introduced by the UK government in 2017 and all companies with over 250 employees are required to report on their gender pay gap annually.

The report shows that the firm, which has 15 offices across the UK, including a Glasgow office, saw a decrease in its mean gender pay gap (the difference in average hourly pay for women compared to men) to 10.3 per cent in 2019.

This is lower than the 12.8 per cent reported in 2018, when the firm had the 6th lowest pay gap across reporting law firms. Last year’s average gap in the Top 50 UK law firms was 19.5 per cent.

The firm’s gender bonus gap also narrowed by 5.5 per cent between the number of men and women receiving a bonus. Irwin Mitchell’s mean gender bonus gap is 25.7 per cent. This is lower than the 31.9 per cent in 2018.

The bonus gap calculation differs from the pay gap calculation, as it is based on the number of colleagues who receive a bonus and the differing amounts paid. This means that the bonus gap is impacted by influencing factors including the fact that 91 per cent of the firm’s part-time colleagues are women and the fact bonuses are pro-rated against a full time salary.

In terms of gender diversity, 70 per cent of Irwin Mitchell colleagues are female, while women make up 65 per cent of regional managing partners and 42 per cent of partners. In 2020, 63 per cent of promotions to associate and senior associate at Irwin Mitchell were also women.

In 2019 77 per cent of colleagues promoted to partner level were women. Irwin Mitchell has the highest percentage of female solicitors (65 per cent) out of any other UK law firm and is in the top 10 for percentage of female partners.

For the third year running the team at Irwin Mitchell also published data on its partner pay gap and, for the first time, they also published ethnicity pay gap figures.

The firm’s ethnicity pay gap stands at -2.3 per cent favourable to ethnic groups other than white British. This means there is little difference between the average hourly pay of white British colleagues and those from different ethnic groups.

The ethnicity pay data is based on the 78 per cent who have reported their ethnicity, allowing the firm to report on a dataset of over 2,100 people.

Susana Berlevy, Irwin Mitchell chief people officer and diversity board member, said: “Although our results are again positive, and show an overall improvement from last year, we recognise that there’s still work to do and remain committed to improvement. Part of this includes the hard work taking place to ensure our people policies are developed to support the improvement in gender balance across the organisation.

“We have an ambition to be a leading responsible business, and we demonstrate that by championing fairness, diversity, equality and inclusion. It was hugely pleasing to see that our colleagues recognised our efforts, with diversity being the highest scoring area in last year’s Great Place to Work survey.”