"Women shouldn’t be barristers," a young Brenda Hale was told when she was beginning her career. Speaking at an LSE discussion on Wednesday evening which I attended, Hale recalled being informed that women were either "too stubborn or too yielding" for the "fighting profession" that is the Bar...
One may reasonably infer that Hale's subsequent decision to become a legal academic rather than a barrister was not unrelated to this piece of advice. Later, she would practise at the Bar part-time, before becoming the first High Court judge to be appointed from academia in 1994.
These days, of course, Hale sits in the UK Supreme Court – the solitary woman among a gaggle of eleven men. Why (given that about 40% of lawyers in this country are women) the extreme gender imbalance?
Hale's answer to this question was that there is "unconscious" sexism among those at the top of the legal profession. "There’s an awful lot of unconscious assumptions and judgements that are made when people don’t realise that is what they’re doing," she said.
Having set out this theory, Hale then quipped that, on a personal level, greater diversity in the Supreme Court would be particularly positive because it would be nice "to have someone to talk about shopping with".
Hmmm...
Isn't that the sort of line that plays straight into the consciousnesses of the "unconscious" sexists? Or is she just being charmingly self-deprecating? I can't decide...