Lady Hale calls for more female judges in Supreme Court
Lady Hale, deputy president of the Supreme Court and the first female Law Lord, has called for another women to be appointed to the court before she retires.
“I do not want to be the last,” she said this week.
“I am disappointed that in the 10 years since I was appointed not one among the 13 subsequent appointments to this court has been a woman. Now, things are improving in the lower ranks of the judiciary, but regrettably not yet up here.”
Speaking at the annual Supreme Court press conference, she rejected the idea of positive discrimination, and suggested appointing more solicitors to the judiciary as a means of redressing the imbalance.
“The two principal causes [for the lack of women] are the facts that we have a legal profession which is divided into barristers and solicitors, coupled with the fact that only the top barristers have traditionally been seen as those possessed of the merit required to be a top judge,” she said.
“Analytically there is no doubt that those are the two causes. I am not saying that we should have a fused legal profession, but one of the things, among many, that I say is that we could look much more broadly for top calibre lawyers to be members of especially this court because we are not trial judges. We are deciding high points of principle.
“That is one of the reasons why diversity of values and experience is particularly important.”
Women are making some progress in the judiciary.
Three out of 10 recent recommendations to the Court of Appeal were women, and women made up a third of the last round of recommendations for the Queen’s Bench and Family Divisions of the High Court.
These results were an improvement on the three previous comparable High Court selections, when women made up 14, 23 and 15% respectively of those recommended.
Members of the selection panels for the most recent Lord Chief Justice and President of the Queen’s Bench Division selections had refresher training on unconscious bias. Salaried part-time working was introduced to the High Court earlier this year under the Crime and Courts Act 2013, to make judicial office accessible to a wider category of applicants.
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