A new report from the International Bar Association (IBA) Legal Policy & Research Unit (LPRU), has cast the spotlight on gender disparity in Nigeria’s legal profession.
The report in question has revealed the dearth of women in senior positions in the judiciary with only 33% occupying senior roles.
Furthermore, the report reveals that, currently, only four out of 37 attorneys-general in the country are women.
It is said the country’s public sector has the highest representation of women in senior positions, with 61 percent of practitioners being women, followed by the corporate sector, with 55%.
Law firms have the second lowest number of women in senior roles (43%), behind the judiciary (33%).
Yakubu Maikyau, President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), was quoted saying: “The NBA has consistently maintained the position that for us to achieve transformative change in the world, issues relating to gender equality and empowerment must be prioritised and addressed head-on.”
He added: “We are, therefore, happy to identify with and support the IBA and LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation’s “50:50 by 2030” Gender Project. It is an innovative and unprecedented project through which the legal profession looks inwards. It has been shown empirically that any limitation on the capacity and capability of a woman is but a product of artificial imagination which is totally unjustifiable.“
Maikyau thanked all participating law firms, corporate organisations, public sector organisations and members of the judiciary who supported the project in Nigeria.
“I urge all NBA members to study the report when it is published, learn from the data contained within, and become champions of the change we want to see in our nation. Furthermore, I implore all bar associations and law societies to fully support this project when the spotlight is turned towards their jurisdictions,” he said.
Meanwhile, additional findings from the Nigeria report include:
- the three most popular gender equality initiatives are coaching and mentoring programmes, flexible working arrangements and leadership training for women.
- the public sector and the judiciary do not have any specific policies or initiatives in place to push women to the top of their organisations.
- the least popular initiative is quota setting, and leadership training was considered by respondents to be the least effective.
- only 68% of respondents said that they monitor gender representation overall and at a senior level; and
- only 40% of corporate sector respondents monitor gender balance within senior roles.
The report also highlighted that one notable trend across England and Wales, Nigeria, Spain and Uganda is the high representation of female lawyers in the public sector.
In England and Wales, 64% of lawyers in the public sector are women, of which 57% hold the most senior positions.
Similarly, in Uganda, 57% of lawyers in the public sector are women, with 62% represented at a senior level.
In the Spanish legal profession, 62% of lawyers across the public sector are women, although in this jurisdiction, only 38% are in the most senior positions.
A similar trend is also observed in the Nigerian legal profession, with 68% of women lawyers represented in the public sector and 61% working in senior roles. In terms of initiatives, flexible working arrangements, and coaching and mentoring programmes for women are the most popular across all four jurisdictions.
Legal professionals in Chile, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates are to be surveyed next.
IOL