“There are significantly higher numbers of women who are buyers of services, so understanding women clients is equally as important as focusing on women lawyers,” says Chown.

To increase women lawyers’ profile within the firm, a newsletter was developed to showcase them; senior female associates from each of the firm’s offices now put it out three times a year, in English and French. It covers its women partners, pro bono work, those having babies, and includes advice and “support on the path to partnership.”

The firm has also developed an extensive program to help new mothers and even fathers. “It’s a very difficult transition, becoming a parent and trying to stay focused on a practice,” notes Chown, who herself became the mother of twin boys in the first year of her own practice, nearly three decades ago. McCarthy’s “maternity-leave buddy program” matches each new mother with a senior woman lawyer “who’s been through it,” says Chown.

A custom-made parental-leave tool kit is available online, filled with practical information on flex time and useful articles on parenting. And six hours of confidential coaching by a trained therapist is also available to lawyers and their spouses.

And mentoring is very important, she says, adding that “we don’t have enough senior women to be mentors.” Still, the firm has “a good formal program,” and, with consulting firm Catalyst, it has also developed peer-to-peer mentoring within practice groups.

But, in the profession overall, LaCalamita’s lawyers point to the gaping discrepancies in the status of female and male lawyers. “There are women partners I know who’ve had two or three kids: senior associates make more [than they do],” says MacKillop. “And there are difficult discussions with large firms about time,” such as, “If you’re not going to work the hours, how can I trust you with these files?”

Eberts, a prominent litigator who has worked on the equity issue as a law society bencher, and was one of the co-chairs for the preparation of the CBA-Ontario (now OBA) contribution for the Bertha Wilson task force on women in the legal profession, says despite the perception that women generally have achieved equality with men, they are in fact falling behind. In the legal profession there has been good progress with women advancing in government service and within corporate counsel ranks, and after that on the bench, she says.

But private practice has fared less well. “All the studies are turning up the same information over and over,” says Eberts. “The strategy of trying to reward voluntary efforts of compliance [with equity guidelines], or coaxing [firms] to do it, are simply not working, because they’re not doing it.”

In equity lawsuits, she adds, courts tend to find in favour of female blue-collar plaintiffs, but find against those who are professional and wealthier, or who are seeking equal access to power or money. “The time is certainly ripe for the law society to be dealing with [the equity issue], and the profession was very positive about the [Ontario] law society taking a leadership role,” says Pawlitza, who has admitted to frustration at the lack of advancement of women at her former (now disbanded) firm of Goodman and Carr LLP, where she was also an equity partner.

On the West Coast, Kerry Simmons is a member of Young Lawyers, the Women Lawyers Forum, and a past chairwoman of Women Rainmakers, Vancouver Island; called to the bar in 2000, she practises litigation and family law with Cook Roberts LLP in Victoria. Simmons says she hasn’t found discrimination toward women a concern among her colleagues, although there is consternation that more women than men are leaving private practice.

“I’ve found that the stories I’ve heard from women who are senior to me, and the concerns they express, are not as prevalent as they seem to have been at [one] time,” she says. “So I think there’s improvement in the way the profession has adapted to women being in it, and part of it. . . . [It] is definitely improving all the time.”