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At a panel discussion hosted recently by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy in collaboration with the Oxford University, Supreme Court Justice Indu Malhotra provided an insight into the position of “Women in the Legal Profession” in the face of the stigma that attaches to their gender.
She began by telling her journey as an AOR and how after 30 years she was designated a senior.Justice Malhotra advanced how she had to “start afresh at the base” in the profession again when, despite having handled commercial matters as an AOR, she was initially only engaged in family matters, MACT and land acquisition cases as a senior, to be trusted with commercial matters only in her last six years as a Senior Advocate. She added that her contemporary males even commanded a much higher fee due to the existence of gender bias.
She elaborated on the hesitation of Female lawyers to “network” and how they need support from their family to balance their work and family life.She went on to say that women find it hard to lobby for such posts as the Solicitor General, the ASG etc. It was only in 2009, after over 60 years of independence, that a female ASG was appointed for the first time and only because the Attorney General had a very high opinion of her legal acumen. Even in the High Courts, which is the base area, women are not commonly appointed as ASGs.
In his turn, the fourth senior-most Supreme Court judge, Justice A. K. Sikri, was of the view that though there has been progress on the gender equality front, it still feels that we are lagging behind and that we have achieved hardly anything. He indicated the irony of how the legal fraternity, which is responsible for enforcing the right to equality as embodied in Article 14 and being a part of the universal legal rights, is itself grappling with gender inequalities at the stages of legal education, the profession and the judiciary.
He quoted some statistics showing the poor representation of women at the bar and the bench, as perthe research conducted by Vidhi, only 10% of the Advocates in the lower judiciary are women, while the percentage of female Senior Advocates in the Supreme Court is a meagre 2.9%. Further, since 1950, there have been only 8 female judges in the apex court; even the present number of three women judges, he regarded as “dismal”.
Speaking of his experience in the recruitment for three batches to the lower judicial services as a High Court Chief Justice, he advanced that 70% of the successful candidates were women. By virtue of such performance in the judicial services in the last 7 years, the judge seemed optimistic that the “complexion in the lower judiciary” shall change in the next 10-15 years; that as far as the representation of women in the lower judiciary is concerned, over a period of time, it will be higher than men because of their own merit.
JusticeSikri mentioned how at a recent discussion held at the Yale Law School, five women judges from different international jurisdictions had spoken of their struggles at the bench, with one revealing that the Presiding Judge would not even look at her or discuss with her while deciding cases or dictating an order in court and that the benchmark for female judges to prove their credentials is for them to be exceptionally good unlike their male counterparts who can comfortably be average.
In the same thread, he quoted how former Chief Justice Leila Seth, the first woman to become the Chief Justice of a state High Court, said that whenever there is a function, the women are to oversee the tea arrangements.
Assuring that now that heis a member of the collegium, he will suggest trying to have a mechanism where women of equal merit get a fair chance.
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