IWD2026 - Shifting Pyramids: Women, Technology and the Forces that Shape Us

Shifting desert sand pyramids

Pyramids have been in the news recently, where it turns out the Pyramids of Giza may be way, way older than previously dated.  Which sparks many questions, as well as realisations about the incredible strength of their built integrity, whatever the dated number.  I had been thinking about pyramids in a different context: whether the reshaping of traditional pyramid structures in professional services will have a positive impact on women.  I have concluded not at all, without the movement of other forces.

Pyramid structures in professional services are built on people not built integrity, but their incentives are the type that subsist.  The model is the sweating of human capital, with the few at the top monetising the time and work of the many below, who progress ‘upward’ until the shape caps their ceiling.

My hypothesis went that the adoption of technology and the operating models that enable the harnessing of it are going to disrupt the pyramid model in radical ways and that disruption is going to be an equalising force for women, enabling them to advance faster and more freely than historically these constructs have allowed. As has been pointed out in legal services for a number of years now, we will not need armies of lawyers to deliver outcomes for clients in the future. The same in consulting, accounting and of course more.  Outcomes will be delivered by a combination of expert and machine, or by machines alone, coded by experts, and where those experts involve a range of professions beyond the sector subject matter (software engineering, AI governance, data science, process design, UX and more).

Women are disadvantaged by the long documented ceilings in professional services pyramids, but also in other more subtly undermining ways.  These are environments that train you in a certain set of behaviours that do not lend themselves to leadership or to the maximising of your potential outside of a singular specialism.  Advancement is predicated on being a good little trooper - crunching out the work, emulating your bosses, and eradicating mistakes and risk from the face of your Earth.  There is a ‘type’ to be that ‘make it’.  Fresh ideas and rocking of boats are to be taken under career limiting advisement.  Noting that we currently rely on these environments to train the vast majority of our professional services practitioners across our economies. There are some great women who make it despite or even because of the cultural conditioning, and some organisations who have sought to break the bind, including more virtual firm or company models with different profit share arrangements.  But in the norm, it trains the fire out of you.  

This is one of the biggest things you notice when you go in-house from a professional services firm - that you have been unknowingly trained to follow and not lead.  You may have developed an intense aptitude for initiative within the scope of your perceived remit, but that is a bound behavioural permission beyond which you are subtly inhibited to move.  Some fly quickly through this process and it was one of the greatest joys for me when I went in house on secondment and then permanently at 5 years PQE: the impact and autonomy.  I was lucky to have amazing bosses, colleagues and mentors at that time and I forever thank them (Yahoo! diaspora you know who you are). This sense of re-claimed agency is the same for many who go in-house and it is notable that we have so many brilliant female General Counsel in the legal profession - also a fast-growing cohort in both size and influence.  Some find the move hard, though most have sought the new environment for a version of the same invigorating reason.  However the progression, there is often retained in some guise the unwritten deference of the pyramid structure training - to the point that many find it hard to rock the boats that need to be rocked, or stand in the face of the conflicts inherent as well as ad hoc that are a coded part of a professional services in-house role. It takes some re-wiring - as I also had to learn.  How do you handle those situations when you have been trained to avoid or transact around them?  The imprinting also carries into other areas of women’s lives.

But the shape of these structures is set to change.  Conservative estimates are that 40% of activity currently undertaken by ‘fee earners’ in professional services firms can be automated. This maps with my own operational analysis in AI strategy work with law firms, some of whom are projecting a materially higher number.  This shrinks the base of the pyramid.  Instead you stand upon the work of fewer people using a range of tools.  Later that mix shifts again as AI agents take over further tasks and where no ‘human in the loop’ is the explicit aim. We see firms already emerging who are a T shape: a few senior experts working with a single tech stack, delivering a great service.  Or you could say each expert is their own pyramid.  This is increasingly how I think about the fractional General Counsel side of my practice - leveraging tools to maximise output, with the governance and integrity required of that.  The rise of ‘fractional’ itself feels like an extension of this evolution of agency. 

There is a whole deeper analysis there, about how you sustain a business model built on billing for people’s time, when clients demand the cost savings of automation.  One answer of course is scaling the volume of work to sustain the revenue line, and clients have no shortage of work to be done.  But clients are also themselves innovating, automating and thereby in-sourcing, so over a long horizon, the ‘big’, really difficult work will be where the focus lies in outsourcing (with slightly different dynamics for consumer, citizen and small business professional services, where, by the way, an ocean of opportunity remains).  The other answer is diversification - and the one I remain most excited about for professional services: working with clients to develop service models that work for what they need over a changing horizon, even (and as the fintechs claim so well) if that means periodically making yourself redundant to then design what’s next, fresh from what has unfolded.   

So, my initial testing hypothesis was that this will be great for women.  These re-shaping organisations will be easier for women to navigate and advance in. Technology will mean they can scale themselves and manage family or caring responsibilities more sustainably with their careers.  And women mastering technology at a time when many are still to get to grips with it, will itself provide invaluable influence and commercial advancement.  This is something we see happening in the in-house world, where GCs - male and female - are being elevated in the board room due to their tech capability and contribution, alongside or above their business peers. 

Adding further to the hypothesis - to have embraced technology to the point of changing the shape of the pyramid, the leadership will have had to have embraced disruptive thinking and that will crack open the traditional constructs that work against women in the workplace - the organisational culture and mindset will have to have evolved to some degree.   

I was delighted by this prospect and the betterment it presents - for women, for clients, for everyone really.  While some aspects of it are undoubtedly true, the problem is that sitting with it, I do not feel it is what will come to pass.  Not without active design and conscious application.  

First, this phase of fast technological development is intense.  Even if you want to embrace and keep up with it, that takes an investment of time many women cannot afford.  Change itself is work.  With women still carrying more domestic and emotional responsibilities at home and with billing pressures in the pyramid structures we are talking about, where does the discretionary capacity and ‘headspace’ come from to learn and experiment with tech?   

Second, it is a non-sequitur that the disruption of the professional services pyramid will necessarily mean a fundamental change in perspective and behaviour of those at the top.  There is a long way to go before the work or revenue dries up to the point of having to reconstitute the entire decision-making process and culture, including the methodology by which one makes it ‘to the top’. It takes a heap of humility, foresight and integrity to go to the very heart of that in leadership.  While we have many acknowledging and working at the edges of that zone, there are few likely to dive whole-bodied into that opportunity.  I look forward to the one of significant standing that does decide to jump, and to the market disco that has the potential to initiate.  And where the jumping happens in bounds before an external landing, it may be that we will be in for a great surprise.   

Third, the underlying demands of professional services do not change. Clients need support when they need it, at the intensity they need it.  Leadership, culture and process dictate how that is served.  These things do not change themselves, they have to be designed in.    

Now this piece started with professional services pyramids, but corporations and institutions are also pyramids - albeit of different constitution. The same principles apply, with a more adaptable incentive structure, where value generation is not tethered to billing for human output.  We see Klarna and Block already chopping their base with large layoffs in the embracing of automation, and certainly there is unnecessary bloating in many institutions.  But does the culture change amidst that restructuring, to the point of making them more favourable environments for women to thrive?   No it does not.  The opportunity is there but not, actually, the necessity.  There is of course much more to it than corporate structure. 

We see the same cycle emerging in legal services, which is becoming one of the first professional services environments outside finance to have a venture capital moment.  Lawtech products Harvey and Legora are the exemplar MBA case studies, disrupting how we think about legal services and the models and funding that underpin them.  As with the rise of fintech, these organisations are hiring out of incumbent firms, including great people who were unable to effect the revolution there.  Similar in its why for many in-house lawyers who tap out of the firms that trained them: the change-makers find purpose elsewhere.  The degree to which these disruptive businesses embrace female equality more or differently to other legal services environments I have no analytics, beyond there being no female founder in either of the two mentioned, and only 14% of UK lawtechs being female founded (ref LawtechUK).  

The opportunity is there, but not the incentive. Which is the entire point and reason for my ultimate conclusion, albeit depressing, about technology and the changing shape of organisations ultimately not being a forcing function for female equality without a more fundamental shift.  We have for centuries gone round these cycles.  Ultimately, it is people at the top of organisations that decide how they want to run them and the people they wish to hire and lead alongside them. The law has enshrined and mandated progress.  But the pace of change is painfully incremental and variously regressive. 

That said, there are changes coming in the most unexpected places.  Whatever is said about Donald Trump, he has a penchant for putting punchy women in positions of power. He realises the importance of power at the base (of a pyramid, political, legal or business wise, however wide or deep) - demonstrably irrespective of gender.  I love that aspect.  It is one that every government and organisation can learn from and one of the most accelerative ways to jump beyond the incremental.    

Alongside that, tech and data capability, are methodologies of empowerment.  They present a way to work differently and re-think how client objectives can be met more effectively - how value can be created and how space can be made for that to be made manifest.  These are moments women can be at the centre of, no matter any prior standing or organisational structure.  Everyone is learning on the job and can catch up fast.  

This time, then, of vast acceleration does offer an opportunity.  It is not a given or an automatic, or a panacea to the fundamentals that need to change in business and society, but it is available for all who want to embrace it.  To which I would end with some practical things:

Dear women

Lean in to technology.  Do not get taken by the machine in any capacity, but learn what it can and can’t do and how to harness it.  Stay relevant, stay ahead.  Tap into the ecosystem.  Make time.

Alongside the above, know that there are forces upon you that will wish you to be and behave a certain way.  There is a practicality to that because you need (and to keep) a job and want to enjoy it.  But also be astute to where and how you are being shaped and whether that serves you in the longer term (or not).  Irrespective, hold true to your line and get a mentor (or two) who can help you with this journey amidst the inevitability of such forces. 

Dear professional services bosses

Give your people the space to learn and expand. Understand the hidden incentives and disincentives to that process, including in performance and billing targets.  Think intentionally and realistically about the culture you have and the leaders you need by your side, not only through the lens of making jam today, but through the lens of growing fruit trees for tomorrow.

Dear educators

Know you are part of a shifting ecosystem and an influential ‘seeder’ shaping what grows downstream.  Educate in the principles and broad capabilities the professions need to serve clients now, in and for this adjusted future, not only for the structures of the past.  Train don’t just teach.  

‘May the force be with you’ (Star Wars) and with us all.