WELLINGTON CHIMWARADZE | Gender and cultural diversity gives law firms the edge over competitors

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 many legal requirements put in place to ensure more diversity across the SA 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 (LLB) 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? 

There are the many requirements of SA’s transformation legislation to be met – the Employment Equity Act, the BBBEE Act and Codes, the Skills Development Levies Act, and the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act. Many of us in the legal and corporate spheres truly want to see young people, especially young black people, flourish.

After two years of discussions, the South African General Counsel for Diversity & Inclusion (GC for DI) was founded in 2019 and launched in 2023 to foster greater diversity, equity and inclusion in the SA legal profession.

This initiative gives us the support we need to meet this challenging task. Global management consulting firm McKinsey conducted a survey across 15 countries involving over 1 000 large companies which revealed that 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 titled Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters, published in May 2020, 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.

The story doesn't end with gender diversity; ethnic and cultural diversity also packs 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 a whopping 36% in terms of profitability.

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

We established the organisation after attempts to drive transformation in the corporate and legal sectors were not as effective as we would have liked. We 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.

Ensuring diversity means giving everyone an equal opportunity, but this can be a confusing notion. It is important to realise that people come from different backgrounds and different levels of privilege. If you want to give everyone an equal chance, you have to take their backgrounds into account. 

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.

It’s also not enough to simply do this at interview time, ensuring a level playing field needs to continue throughout an individual’s career. People’s backgrounds affect the way they approach their job, and the way they behave at work. Ensuring diversity at work requires creating a space in which everyone feels they belong.

We all have an unconscious bias to choose people we relate with when we pick teams, but this leads to exclusion. We need a framework that helps us rise above our unconscious biases, and GC for DI is there to collaborate with other industry players to provide the frameworks and the support needed to realise genuine equity.

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

We know what is required is an ecosystem change, and continue to call upon others in the industry to join the cause and create scale to achieve transformative change for the profession, industry and the country.

Wellington Chimwaradze is the general counsel for Unilever Africa