Men’s domination of the senior echelons of the British judiciary means the law is biased against women. We urgently need gender quotas for women in senior legal roles.
Men account for around 87% of Queen’s Counsel,76% of judges, and 11 out of 12 supreme court justices. It took 127 years for the first woman – Baroness Hale – to be appointed a law lord. Prior to 2003, or women were invisible and had no adjudicating voice in the most senior court of our country. But a statistic that must give us serious cause for concern is that of 47 Council of Europe nations,only Azerbaijan and Armenia had lower proportions of female members of the judiciary than the UK in 2014.
It is a travesty because it results in many anti-women biases in British law. Last month, the court of appeal, or for example,reached a momentous decision that recent government legal aid rules unlawfully denied victims of intimate partner violence access to public funding in family law cases. Women who bear endured rape and beatings at the hands of their former partners are forced to face their abusers in family courts without legal representation. Some women are even cross-examined by their abuser. So the law provides a route for victimisation of women by abusive ex-partners.
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Source: theguardian.com