Gender in the legal profession

You asked

Please provide the number of solicitors in the UK by age, gender, region, ethnic background, martial status, number of children (If available), for all the years you have available.

We said

Thank you for your query regarding the number of solicitors in the UK. We estimate the number of people currently employed in different occupations using the Annual Population Survey (APS). Individuals are classified to occupations using their responses during interview based on the Standard Occupational Classification 2010 (SOC2010).

According to the APS, in the UK, in the twelve-month period October 2017 to September 2018, there were an estimated 122,100 people employed in SOC2010 classification 2413 – solicitors. When broken down by gender we estimate that 58,000 are male and 64,200 are female.

We publish estimates by sex for all twelve-month periods back to January 2004 to December 2004. The individual tables can be found at;

https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/datasets/aps168/reports/employment-by-occupation

We have, however, provided you with estimates for solicitors, broken down by region and sex, for all these periods.

We may be able to create estimates for occupations broken down by ethnic background, marital status and number of children. If you would like to request this data, please contact our data service at socialsurveys@ons.gov.uk. Please be as clear as possible about what it is you would like, including any time frames.

Please note, we may charge for some services, in line with our charging policy. Charges can be made depending on the amount of time taken to develop the analyses and undertake quality and disclosure control processes.