Students from different fields – be it medicine, law, engineering, or humanities – have definitely come across this one term: patriarchy. Our society is known to be patriarchal, wherein it is structured such that males are constantly presented with opportunities to assert their dominance.
While this was more true in the past, our society has evolved to embrace gender equality, and view both males and females equally. In the professional arena, women have increasingly been appointed as leaders of any given organization or company.
Moreover, relentless activism for recognizing women’s rights and providing equal opportunities to women has been the driver to help us achieve a level of equality between men and women.
While we are moving towards a more progressive society, whether we can confidently claim that we have achieved gender equality is still a question which remains to be answered. This article explores the issue of gender inequality within the legal profession.
The Underrepresentation of Women in the Law
In Australia, the year 2021 was remarkable as for the first time, every state in Australia had more women lawyers than men lawyers. Last year, it was reported that 53 percent of solicitors in Australia are women.
While these numbers paint a rosy picture, women are still severely underrepresented, especially in senior levels. Moreover, gender pay gaps still exist with women getting the short end of the stick across all levels in the legal profession.
There are many reasons which can be attributed to the underrepresentation of women. Firstly, the very structure of the legal profession which some argue is still male-dominated, and inherent bias in the industry leads to more men being promoted to senior levels than women.
Structural reforms are needed to address these issues. However, more pressingly, the lack of flexibility offered to women in the field is the primary reason. Many women find themselves having to choose between pursuing a career or a family.
Globally, women still take on more family caring roles as compared to men. The absence of opportunities provided to women to embrace both their personal and professional role is still a major hurdle to achieving gender equality in the legal profession.
Many women who choose to work part-time in order to look after their family are given minor, and easy cases to handle which often hampers their career progression. Senior lawyers are required to have advanced experience and ability to handle more sophisticated, and complex matters.
Women in turn are not able to procure this level of experience because their competence is often underestimated, and thereby they are not provided with complicated matters to deal with.
Conclusion
As with any industry, structural inequality, shared set of assumptions and outdated traditional views of gender roles lead to underrepresentation of women. These reasons truly impede progress, and pose a serious hurdle to achieving absolute gender equality.
Although there are more women solicitors in the profession today in many developed nations such as the UK, the US and Australia, more senior level positions in the field are still held by men.
We need people to acknowledge these inequalities, and reforms to address these issues on a global scale.
About the Author
John Bui is the Principal Solicitor at JB Solicitors, a law firm based in Sydney, Australia. The firm deals with matters falling under family law, commercial law, property law and criminal law among others.
