Women are now 57.5% of New Zealand’s lawyers. Follow the ownership and the pay, and that majority starts to thin out.
New Zealand law has solved its headcount problem. Ownership is taking longer.
Steve Braunias’s Newsroom investigation quotes the Chief Justice asking “why are we failing to improve”, and sets out 12 years of Bar Association data that has barely moved. It also calls LawFuel’s terminology “crazed”, which is a fair cop, but being called crazed by New Zealand’s leading connoisseur of murder is a bit like being told you’re overdressed by a peacock.
And we plead guilty to describing Lady Deborah Chambers a ‘Divorce Diva’, nobody has ever read ‘senior relationship property practitioner’ to the end of a sentence.
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The short version
- Women are 57.5% of lawyers but 43% of partners and directors, on June 2026 Law Society figures.
- They were 64.5% of lawyers in their first seven years at June 2025.
- At Gender Equality Charter law firms, their share of equity partnerships remains below 40%.
- In ALPMA’s 2026 salary survey, the equity partner pay gap is 7.9%, or about $23,000 a year.
A partnership title
A partnership looks identical on LinkedIn whether it carries a share of the profits or a salary. The Auckland Women Lawyers’ Association’s 2025 table shows why that matters.
Anderson Lloyd and Tompkins Wake each listed 14 women partners. All 14 at Anderson Lloyd were full-equity. At Tompkins Wake, three were. Firm structures differ, and the table does not show each firm’s total full-equity numbers, but a headline partner count clearly does not tell you who owns what.
The blank cells
Only 12 of the 38 firms gave AWLA a figure for women in full equity. Among the seven largest partnerships, only Russell McVeagh’s number appears: 16 women. A blank means a firm did not respond or declined.
Law firms would take a dim view of a counterparty offering that level of disclosure in due diligence.
The pipeline defence
It deserves a fair hearing. Women were 47% of the profession a decade ago, and partnership takes time. Women took 48% of new partnerships since July 2017 at both Chapman Tripp and Dentons Kensington Swan. ALPMA also found broad pay parity at junior levels, with women ahead at associate and senior associate level.
But waiting only works if somebody keeps checking. Charter law firms running pay audits fell from 72% to 63% in two years. Reviews of retention and promotion across law firms and in-house teams fell from 73% to 51%.
The courtroom problem
The money shows up in court too. The Bar Association’s December 2024 report put women at 30% of lead counsel in the Court of Appeal and 26% in the Supreme Court over four years. Strip out Crown Law cases and those figures fall to 22% and 16%. In Court of Appeal civil cases, women led for the appellant 44 times. Men did so 344 times.
“The big commercial briefs still tend to go to the boys,” Lady Deborah Chambers told Newsroom.
Criminal barrister Julie-Anne Kincaid, whose clients come to her directly, points to the instructing solicitor as the filter. Yet only 37% of Charter signatories have adopted the voluntary target of sending women 50% of external instructions, and only about a third of those briefing externally track the data.
LawFuel’s view
Not every gap is discrimination. Career breaks, client portfolios and individual choices all play a part. But firms cannot diagnose what they will not measure in public.
The Law Society has launched a five-year diversity strategy. A simpler test would be three numbers, published annually by every large firm: women’s share of full equity, the partner pay gap, and who leads the biggest matters.
A profession that demands full disclosure from everybody else should be able to manage that.
Related on LawFuel: our 2023 gender survey of NZ law firms and the glass ceiling in the higher courts.
