I think the legal profession is the perfect example, because it has had fifty-fifty intake at the junior levels for two and a half or three decades now, and yet women are not making it to partners. In the legal industry, typically the partner level has about 20% women.
You mentioned a few of the things that are happening. Part of it is that sales cycle and where it happens and how business is developed, but I don't think that is the key problem. I think there's a lot of the unconscious bias piece that I was talking about: how work is allocated in a law firm, who gets the best deals, who gets access to the best clients, and who gets the sponsorship from the key partners. That's how you make partner. You have to be good at what you do—that's table stakes—but those relationships are critical in advancing to partner. I think that happens quite often.
I think there is certainly the issue of family and what happens when you're having a family. One of my firm recommendations is that when you think about parental leave, think about how you're going to get men to actually take parental leave. First of all, let's have very progressive policies around that, because until we remove that, that's a key barrier for women. Until men start taking parental leave, that's a barrier in the corporate world for women. There's a huge stigma for both men and women around it. I think if, from a policy perspective, there are ways to encourage men to take that leave, it will have a huge impact.
There was actually a good research report done by EY and the Peterson Institute for International Economics that showed there was a correlation between men taking paternity leave and the proportion of women in leadership. However, there was no correlation between the length of maternity leave, or maternity leave policies, and women in leadership, so that's something we as a country really need to think about. Other Scandinavian countries are really thinking about that.