Amber Warren, chair of Dentons Australia, talks about closing the gender pay gap and why policies are not enough
Dentons Australia, one of the largest law firms in Australia, has clocked up a gender pay equity milestone – male and female lawyers in the same roles now receive equal remuneration.
The firm says it reduced its median gender pay gap to zero after an intensive three-year program that involved everything from changes to job ad wording, to annual remuneration reviews and salary recalibration.
Australian chair and Australasia region CEO, Amber Warren, said in 2022 the firm’s median gender pay gap was about 15% and “that just didn't sit well with us from a cultural point of view”.
In 2022-23, it closed the gap to 7%, then to 4% in 2023-24 and, after completing the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) compliance reporting for 2025, announced it had achieved a zero median gender pay gap.
(The legal sector had a median gender pay gap of 9.1% in 2023-24, according to the most recent data from the Workplace Gender and Equality Organisation, which collects and publishes information on gender pay gaps.)
Warren said a key change had been the language in recruitment ads to encourage men to take on support roles.
“One of the ways to reach gender pay gap parity was to think about not only how you get more women into legal roles or more senior roles, but how do you get more men into roles that have stereotypically been female jobs?” she said.
“Instead of advertising our support roles as administrative assistant roles, which can be mistaken for sort of a secretarial role, we transitioned our language around those roles to legal support roles.
“Often those sorts of roles are filled by graduates who are looking to move up within a law firm while they study, and we found that using more gender-neutral language meant that we saw a lot more male applicants for those sorts of roles.”
The firm also ran an annual pay calibration process as part of its remuneration and promotion reviews that identified where men in the same role as women were earning more.
And what did they do when they found an anomaly? Warren's response is quick and emphatic.
“Fix it,” she said.
“It's not a cost, it's an investment. Making sure you have diversity leads to better business outcomes. I've never seen it as a cost or an overhead”
Warren says from her experience of more than two decades of reviewing lawyers, generally women are not as vocal about their pay expectations as men.
“So you end up with the people who ask getting what they ask for and the people who don't ask getting what's left and so if you've got a bias towards men being assertive about what they're worth and women not doing the same thing you tend to end up in a situation where the men are being paid more because they're asking,” she said.
“We wanted to specifically target that that particular slant and make sure that women were getting paid the same even though they weren't as forthright about what their value was.”
The firm also reviewed its parental leave policy to ensure it was as easy for dads to take paid leave as mums and encouraged men, particularly in senior roles, to take leave to help end the stereotype that if man takes parental leave, he's not committed to his career.
Beyond pay, the firm has also increased the number of female partners from 12% in 2018 to about 37%.
“I think we have succeeded because we've had the right role models in place,” Warren said.
“I think that you can have all the policies in the world; if the reality for the female lawyers is that they look up at the leadership team and they're all men, there is an inconsistency between the stated aim of the organisation and actually what is role modelled,” she said.
“I think getting your leadership and strong women's advocates in place is really absolutely crucial,” she said.
And the next target according to Warren?
“I want to see 50/50 female equity partners.”
