Page 17 - Plesner CSR 2019_UK

Sustained focus on women and careers
One of the greatest challenges we face
is to include more women in the group
of partners. It is of little comfort that the same applies to other major Danish and international law firms, or that the business community in general continues to face the challenge of achieving equal gender repre- sentation at senior management level.
Our basic view is that anyone with the necessary professional and business skills should be given the opportunity to become a partner at Plesner – irrespective of their gender. However, there is no mistaking
the statistics, and we need to improve the conditions for our talented female lawyers who appear on course to meet our partner- ship requirements, so they will stay with us. We do not intend to lower our qualification requirements, but management continues its efforts to map our career paths and ex- amine how we make structural adjustments and increase flexibility in order to smooth the path for more female partners.
Special focus via mentoring scheme
In the reporting period, we maintained
the strong focus on our female talent – for example by way of Plesner's targeted men- toring scheme which dates back to spring 2014. Inspired by the positive feedback from the first years' programmes, we ap- plied in 2016 for permission to extend the scheme, and the Ministry of Justice granted us permission to extend the mentoring scheme for five years until 2021. In the past year, we have launched additional mentor- ing programmes on the same level as in the preceding reporting period. We have also seen an interesting development towards
more employees looking for interaction with an external mentor with a background in areas other than law.
More inspiration
In the past year, we continued to invite our female talents to regular working lunches centered around themes relevant to the target group. By way of these lunches, a strong sense of cohesion has been estab- lished among the participants – for mutual inspiration and benefit of all parties since many mental barriers can be broken down through open and constructive dialogue. In order to prepare the ground for continued inspiration based on current research and experience, the intention is to arrange a new round of working lunches with internal and external speakers during the up-coming reporting period.
The working lunches have proved to be a good forum for brainstorming on ideas for adjusting our internal processes which may contribute to removing structural barriers. Thus, the group’s input has provided inspi- ration for an extended and more consistent before-during-after-maternity-leave pro- cess which will be implemented before the end of the year. Similarly, in the most recent reporting period we have also made efforts to further develop our feedback culture
via a management training programme. To clarify how the individual colleague can best qualify for the career she or he wishes to pursue, we use career talks to give our tal- ents the right feedback about their develop- ment potential at an even earlier stage.
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