The legal profession in England and Wales is becoming more diverse. However, while white women and black and minority ethnic (BME) individuals now enter the profession in larger numbers, inequalities remain. This article explores the career strategies of 68 white women and BME legal professionals to understand more about their experiences in the profession. Archer’s work on structure and agency informs the analysis, as does Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) ‘temporally embedded’ conceptualization of agency as having past, current and future elements. We identify six career strategies, which relate to different career points. They are assimilation, compromise, playing the game, reforming the system, location/relocation and withdrawal. We find that five of the six strategies tend to reproduce rather than transform opportunity structures in the legal profession. The overall picture is one of structural reproduction (rather than transformation) of traditional organizational structure and practice. The theoretical frame and empirical data analysis presented in this article accounts for the rarity of structural reform and goes some way towards explaining why, even in contexts populated by highly skilled, knowledgeable agents and where organizations appear committed to equal opportunities, old opportunity structures and inequalities often endure.

This article will consider the theoretical explanations for why women are not remaining within and progressing through the ranks of the solicitors' profession in England and Wales. It sets out the findings from a Law Society commissioned project to examine the reasons why women have had a break from practice or chosen to leave the profession. Finally, it considers whether one of the purported strategies used to empower women solicitors ± the business case for equality of opportunity in the solicitors' profession ± is actively working against women and the profession (more broadly), and that only a return to a wider values-based approach to professional identity will meet the criticisms raised by many of the women who participated in this research.

Differences in the working lives of solicitors have become increasingly marked in recent years. Growing numbers of lawyers are employed in the public and corporate sectors and, with the increasing size and wealth of City of London commercial firms, there are significant differences between these firms and thosè high-street' firms that serve local communities. These differences impact on lawyers throughout training and beyond, both in terms of rites of passage into the profession and in conditions of employment. This research, the final stage in a longitudinal survey spanning the 1990s, combines quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the reactions of newly qualified solicitors to their work. Building on the project's previous surveys, which charted the nature of disadvantage suffered by many prospective entrants to the legal profession, the research finds a large measure of satisfaction regarding careers. It also identifies causes for concern, including increasing specialisation in legal education and the potential separation of the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of professional practice.

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Much attention is currently focused on equality and diversity within the legal profession in England and Wales, not least because the profile of law graduates has markedly changed and diversified over the past 20 years, and yet the senior legal profession has yet to reflect the increasing number of women and Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) entrants over that period. A body of previous research evidence from around the UK indicates that social educational background has a major role to play in the extent to which aspiring lawyers gain entry into, progress, and succeed within the legal profession (Shiner, 1994;Shiner et al. 1999;Shiner et al., 2000;Nicolson, 2005;Thomas, 2000, Sommerlad, 2008 (Sommerlad et al., 2010). In that study we used biographical interviews (77)