“Memo to all you well-meaning law firms out there trying your darnedest to retain and promote women: You are doing it all wrong.

All those marvelous initiatives you’ve been touting—flexible work arrangements, mentoring programs, affinity groups, transition coaching for new moms and the like—are not getting women out of the rut. Worse, some of those efforts could be making it harder for women to succeed.

That’s the deflating, if hardly startling, preliminary finding of a study by Acritas and Thomson Reuters that looked at 40 firms (predominantly U.K.-based) in Europe. As initially reported by Legal Week, the study finds there’s a big fat gap between what firms perceive as the fix to the gender problem and what’s needed in reality.”