WHAT does the Church of England have in common with the nation’s biggest commercial law practices?
Clearly it’s not take home pay. A vicar’s stipend can be £1m short of partnership profits earned by some of the City’s best-paid lawyers.
But what they do have in common is grindingly slow progress when it comes to promoting women.
This Church is painfully slowly drawing up laws about the appointment of women to the office of Bishop. It comes as law magazine Legal Week publishes the findings of its research into the number of women promoted to partnership in law firms.
Women now make up more than 60% of the graduate intake of many big firms, but only 28% of partners appointed in the UK’s top 30 firms in the past three years are women, claims Legal Week.
The situation is not all that different locally.
According to research published by The Lawyer magazine last year, women account for only five of Hill Dickinson’s 53 equity partners.
Things are a bit better when you include salaried partners, with the proportion of women rising to 41 out of 151.
At rival Liverpool law firm DWF, only two out of 25 equity partners are women. The proportion rises to 32 out of 125 salaried partners.
Undoubtedly part of the problem is that many women choose to leave the profession, put off by its work all hours never see your kids macho culture.
But that’s not the whole story. Another big cause of the problem is the 1950s a woman’s place is in the home pompous neo-conservatism of lawyers.
The ironic thing is that many of the rejected women would make better lawyers than the men who get to the top. What’s more, they would earn more fees, too.
Its a great pity that so much talent is wasted.
PUZZLING reactions from the business community yesterday when I contacted them to get their reactions to the news that the Valuations Office Agency has agreed to cut the business rates paid by shops in some of our region’s town centres.
The VOA, which sets business rates, has agreed to cut bills paid by some shops in Liverpool, Birkenhead and possibly Southport. Having looked into the matter, it has concluded that Liverpool One has hurt their trade. As a result, rental values, used to set rates, have fallen, hence the concession.
It’s not hard to understand how Liverpool’s new shops have sucked trade out of Birkenhead and Southport. But Liverpool was meant to be different.
The city council is keen to tell us that Liverpool One has brought more shoppers into the city. These extra shoppers don’t just confine themselves to the new shops, but, we are told, spend their money in the traditional retail core as well.
In which case, why does the VOA need to lower their rates? Surely if places like Clayton Square, Church Street and Bold Street are sharing in the benefits of the extra shoppers, the VOA should increase their rates, not lower them.
Liverpool’s business leaders couldn’t decide yesterday whether to welcome the news of lower taxes or deny the existence of the problem of lost trade. You see, to accept the need for rate cuts implicitly acknowledges the fact that there have been some losers, and would mean breaking ranks from the official “everything is all right in Liverpool” line.
But even more puzzling was the VOA’s insistence that no other towns have been adversely affected by Liverpool One. Surely St Helens, Warrington, Wigan, Skelmersdale and others have also been hit.
