Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I also support this amendment. I sigh, because I feel as though I have been working on this issue of diversity in the legal profession and on the Bench all my professional life, which I now have to confess has covered 40 years. It is really important that we recognise how slow progress has been.

I had a conversation with one of those senior men of the law not very long ago about the fact that we only had one woman on the Supreme Court. I was reminded that when the Sex Discrimination Act came in it brought a great flurry of change into the legal profession. Up until that time, chambers used to say, “We don’t take women”. When I started at the Bar, people said that. Then they started saying, “Women? We’ve got one”. My concern is that that sort of attitude, that somehow we are doing fine if we have a woman here and there, is not good enough. During this conversation, I expressed my sadness that we had only one woman on our Supreme Court and mentioned the name of a very eminent and good woman—at which he said, “I know, but she’s so ambitious”, as though this was a truly terrible thing to be, and an attribute that could not be attached to any of the senior men of law who have gone into the Supreme Court.

There is a culture in the law that is resistant to change; it is just the nature of things. We have to create this kind of encouragement if we want to see things move at a better pace.