Five years ago, Sheffield Haworth released the thought paper ‘The Road Less Travelled’ about women’s path to partnership in Professional Services. This year we revisited the recommendations made in 2015 to discover whether the road is more travelled in 2020. We discovered that very little has changed, and that the journey has been more challenging than we anticipated when drawing up our recommendations 5 years ago.
The data paints a bleak picture of the reality of female Partners and MD’s in Professional Services. The Big 4 and the technology consulting giants struggled to increase their global female partnership by more than 2% in the last 5 years. Smaller Professional Services firms barely achieved 20% female representation at Partner, Managing Director and Director level, with some firms having a female executive representation as low as 9%.
