FOCUS FEATURE


ENTERPRISING WOMEN SARAH WALKER-SMITH


Breaking the glass ceiling is a concept often associated with the challenges women face in progressing beyond middle- management roles within professions. As someone working in the legal


industry with big ambitions but no law degree or LPC, Sarah Walker-Smith had identified another barrier. “I used to describe it as being in a glass


box,” she reflects on her earlier career. “If you’re a woman in a law firm and not a lawyer, it felt like there was a glass wall as well as the glass ceiling.” After working at Boots, PwC and Deloitte


as an accountant, Sarah had joined Nottingham-headquartered law firm Browne Jacobson in 2004 as director of business development and marketing. She was promoted to chief operating


officer in 2012, before fully breaking out of her glass box in 2019 when she joined Shakespeare Martineau as the first female, non-lawyer chief executive in a top 50 law firm. Her recruitment signalled how the national firm – which has offices in Leicester and Nottingham, where Sarah is based – was already leading a cultural shift, but it has been fast-tracked since her arrival. The 10-person board includes seven


women while its 111 members – an alternative partnership structure allowing non-lawyers to take equity and decision-making stakes – is 31% female. Not that Sarah has these numbers at the top of her head. “I don’t really count because I don’t think


this matters,” she says. “This is the problem – we’ve got to stop defining people in those boxes and just bring the best people for the job into the job, because professional qualifications, gender, ethnicity


and sexuality don’t define people.” This is why Sarah, a Nottingham Trent


University governor, is adamant that equality issues are “owned” by the board, rather than by equality committees for gender, ethnicity and sexuality. "Utterly ridiculous" is her response to the


idea that non-lawyers can't sit in the most senior positions in law firms – “there’s something like 100,000 lawyers in the UK against a population of 67 million, so why would you limit your talent pool so much?” – while she believes there’s still much to resolve when it comes to why so few women tend to reach partnership, with Solicitors Regulation Authority data from 2017 showing women made up 59% of non- partner solicitors compared to just 33% of partners. Part of the shift towards a “21st century


mindset” may be accelerated by the pandemic, as relaxing attitudes towards remote working could have a domino effect on other aspects of professional workplaces. Sarah, who professes to “hate” the idea


of needing to celebrate women in business as a separate entity while acknowledging its importance on the road to achieving true equality, believes this takes form in both directions. “For example, our wealth team, which


looks after family law and private capital, is predominantly female so we’ve got to get more men into this area,” she adds. “It also applies to part-time working,


which should be accessible to men as well as women. But we need to reset the agenda and start looking at outputs, not inputs, in terms of how people contribute to a business because that will help level


‘If you’re a woman in a law firm and not a lawyer, it felt like there was a glass wall as well as the glass ceiling’


ALLISON KEMP MBE


AIM Commercial Services isn’t a typical business in the transport and logistics industry. Not only is it run by a woman but its team of 12 only includes three men. Managing director Allison Kemp MBE is also one of two women in the


company who hold a transport manager certificate of professional competence (CPC), a rarity in the industry. Allison, who was appointed as chairwoman of Logistics UK’s Road


Freight Council in February last year to lead the industry’s debate on the future of Britain’s road transport sector, says: “The certificate allows us to train other drivers and we’ll often be teaching classes full of men. “Only about 1% of the industry’s workforce is made up of women but I


don’t know why women shy away from it because there’s lots of roles they’d be good at and can bring a different perspective to the table.”


‘Whether it’s me or other women, it’s important to have role models’


Allison admits she is “lucky” to never feeling out of place in the industry having grown up with it. Both her grandfathers worked in transport and logistics – Arthur owned a haulage firm and Charlie drove tipper trucks in quarries – while her father John was also director of Kettering-based logistics firm Knights of Old Group. And though she worked in freight forwarding for her dad’s company


at one stage, she says her big break came while working for another firm that helped her obtain the transport manager CPC – a significant qualification in the industry – aged 25. That’s why she felt it was important to also give her employee Rachael Howarth the same opportunity at a similar age in her Ripley-based


62 business network March 2021


business, which she set up in 2004 and offers services including tachograph analysis, training and transport compliance auditing to more than 1,000 customers across the UK.


“Rachael initially


doubted herself thinking she wasn’t old enough to do the CPC, but when I told her I’d been a similar age, she realised she could give it a go,” says the mum-of- one, who was awarded an MBE in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours list for her work in the transport and logistics sector. “Whether it’s me or other women, it’s important to have role models


as it shows we can all do it if the circumstances are right and we have the support from colleagues and family, which I’ve been very lucky to have. “I have another female employee who joined when she was 16. She’s


now 21 and coming up the ranks so she’ll be heading up our tachograph department soon. “She told me she never thought that opportunity would come to her,


so it just shows that young women especially just need to be given a chance.”


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