Notaries are last of the legal professions for women — and past parity at the entrance
Women are 36% of notaries against 38.5% of barristers, 52% of solicitors and 76.9% of chartered legal executives. Among notaries with under five years' experience they are 55%.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
The Faculty Office’s Diversity in the Notarial Profession 2023 does something unusual for a regulator’s report: it puts its own profession alongside the others and does not flatter itself.
| Notaries | Barristers | Solicitors | Chartered legal executives | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women | 36% | 38.5% | 52% | 76.9% |
| Disability declared | 3% | 6% | 5% | 6% |
| Fee-paying school | 25% | 34% | 23% | 6% |
Those are the Faculty Office’s own comparisons, in its own report, with its own sources footnoted. On the first row it says outright that “notaries currently rank last across the legal professions in this characteristic”.
The trend, and where it is coming from
Women were 24.8% of the notarial profession in 2011 and 36% in 2023 — a rise of more than eleven points in twelve years, against a national benchmark for women in the workforce of 47%.
The more interesting number is in the next sentence of the same report. Among notaries with nought to four years’ post-qualification experience, 55% are female.
So the profession is past parity at the door and eleven points short of it overall. That is what a profession looks like when the composition of its intake has changed and the stock has not caught up — and it means the headline figure will keep rising for as long as the entry cohorts hold, with no further change of any kind.
Ethnicity: above the benchmark, and the reason given
72% of notaries are white and 16.7% are from an ethnic minority background, against 81.7% of the overall UK workforce being white. Within that: 11.4% Asian, 2.8% Black, 2.3% mixed, against a UK workforce of 9.3% Asian, 2.5% Black and 8.7% mixed.
The Faculty Office offers an explanation that is specific to this profession and rings true against the rest of what its register shows: the higher representation “may be owed to the predominately international nature of notarial work which often attracts those with additional language skills or who wish to serve a specific community”. A notary’s entry on the register carries the languages they work in, and most notaries record at least one beyond English.
Disability: the lowest of the four, and a definitional wrinkle
3% of notaries identify as having a disability, against 6% of barristers and chartered legal executives, 5% of solicitors, 16% of the workforce and 23% of the working-age population. The Faculty Office says none of the legal professions comes close to the benchmark, and that the notarial sector “may present more barriers to disabled practitioners due to the information-based nature of the work”.
Its own survey asks a second question, and the answers do not match. Thirty- five notaries said their day-to-day activities are limited by a health problem or disability; twenty-two said they have a disability. The gap is not explained, and the regulator says the survey does not distinguish physical from mental health.
Socio-economic background: down, slightly
25% of notaries attended a fee-paying school, against 9% of the UK population. That is down from 27.5% in 2020, which the report reads as a sign that “new entrants to the profession are more diverse in this respect”.
It is also higher than solicitors (23%) and far higher than chartered legal executives (6%), and lower than barristers (34%). On this measure the four professions are further apart than on any other.
Costs lawyers, and a distinction that matters
The Costs Lawyer Standards Board runs a diversity survey too, and its figures are not the same kind of thing. The Faculty Office reports proportions of the profession. The CLSB reports proportions of the people who replied: 242 of 687 invited replied in 2023 (35%), 159 of 701 in 2024 (23%), and 169 of 746 in 2025 (22.6%).
So the CLSB’s 52.1% women in 2023 is 52.1% of respondents, not of costs lawyers, and 10.3% from Black, Asian, mixed or other ethnic minority backgrounds is likewise of respondents. Those figures are published on this site with “respondents” in the label, in every place they can appear, because “half of costs lawyers are women” and “half of the ones who replied are women” are different claims and only one of them is supported by the data.
The CLSB does note the comparison it can make: 10.3% is lower than the 19% of lawyers in SRA-regulated firms from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.
The figures
Read from the Faculty Office’s Diversity in the Notarial Profession 2023 and the CLSB’s Costs Lawyers: Diversity in the profession 2023 and its 2024 and 2025 surveys. Every figure appears on the reports page with the sentence it came from.
The Faculty Office also publishes diversity surveys for 2011-12, 2014-15, 2017-18, 2019-20 and 2021-23. Their year-by-year charts are pie and bar images whose labels do not survive extraction in a form that can be trusted, so nothing is taken from them: the figures above are the ones the report states in words.