Abstract
The legal profession in England and Wales is becoming more diverse. However, while women and BME practitioners now enter the profession in larger numbers, inequalities remain. This article explores the career strategies of 77 women and BME legal practitioners to understand more about their experiences in the profession. In addition, five interviews with diversity managers in five large law firms were conducted to explore claims of gender and ethnic disadvantage. Archer’s work on structure and agency informs the analysis as does Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) ‘temporarily embedded’ conceptualisation of agency as having past, current and future elements. We identify five career strategies. These are: assimilation, compromise, playing the game, reforming the system from within and withdrawal. We argue that four strategies tend to reproduce, rather than reform, disadvantageous structures in the legal profession, with the overall picture being one of structural reproduction and maintenance of the status quo.
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