Tackling the gender and ethnicity pay gap at Ashurst LLP

The Challenge

As an international law firm, Ashurst LLP are wholeheartedly committed to creating an inclusive workforce.  A key aspect of this is gender and ethnicity pay reporting.

Verditer provide specialist reward expertise to Ashurst LLP, including pay gap analysis and workshops.

“We are really happy with our partnership with Verditer. In addition to providing ongoing reward support, they have worked with us to calculate and analyse our gender and ethnicity pay gaps, draft the commentary, and facilitate action planning workshops, for a number of years now”.

Our Approach

Naturally, as a law firm, Ashurst have high standards when it comes to reporting and embracing the spirit as well as the letter of the regulations.

Understanding the pay gap in law firms is not straightforward.  The partner group make up a significant part of the population, yet are rewarded differently and not part of the current regulations.

The challenge of including partners in the calculation is that they are not employees so don’t have the traditional reward structure of pay and bonus.  A ‘total cash’ approach is therefore required but there is no published methodology for doing this.

The reporting is further complicated by two very distinct career paths; from the structured careers of fee-earners to the complex variety of professionals within Business Support.

“Our gender pay work is complex, but we have faith and confidence in the output produced by the Verditer team.”

The Outcome

To support Ashurst’s progressive approach, our pay gap reports provided significant additional analysis alongside the regulatory requirements.  We cut through all the data to provide understandable analysis, clear summaries, and insightful conclusions.

“Verditer work as an integral and engaged part of our team, spending time and energy getting to grips with our data and ensuring everything is absolutely spot on.”

Our workshops then helped key stakeholders better understand the figures and develop clear action plans for gender and ethnicity parity.

From this we then prepared draft voluntary narratives to support internal and external communication.