How family life takes away women lawyers and judges

Women’s Day just went past. And like every year, it meant soaking in the warmth of the ritualistic exaltation of women, often without practicing it. Be that as it may, world over, the past few decades have seen women making significant strides in every walk of life. The higher judiciary in India is no exception, where we have seen many firsts. Here are a few: Justice Fathima Beevi, the first Supreme Court judge in 1989, Justice Kanta Bhatnagar the first woman chief justice of the Madras high court in 1992; all-women first bench of Justice Indira Banerjee sitting with Justice Bhavani Subbaroyan adorning the chief justice’s court of the Madras high court in 2017, and the first all-women full bench of three women judges. While talking of firsts, we cannot but remember Justice Anna Chandy, the first woman judge in India who went on to become a high court judge as early as in 1959.Last week, when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated as the first black woman to the Supreme Court of the US, reactions were of ecstatic satisfaction on the one hand, and of decrying it as a mere measure of affirmative action on the other.All firsts deserve to be celebrated, especially when it comes to women, for it is one more milestone in our eternally long journey of empowerment. medium90129697 The Chief Justice of India has advocated 50% reservation for women in the judiciary. The number of women judges in the Supreme Court and high courts is less than 20% of the total strength of the respective courts. The Madras high court with 13 women judges of its sanctioned strength of 75, enjoys the distinction of having the highest number of women judges in any high court in the country. What makes these dismal numbers harbingers of hope is that the number of women lawyers as compared to their male counterparts is less than 10%. While the idea of reservation is to translate into greater opportunities for women, it is important to realise that reservation is not the solution. The sheer lack of the number of practising women lawyers would belie the specious promise that ‘reservation’ holds. While the number of men and women who enter law school is more or less equal, the number of women who continue their practice dwindles drastically due to familial pressures, particularly during their motherhood, after which many find it difficult to meet the challenges of this demanding profession. Untitled Carousel 81950471It is therefore pertinent to address two pivotal factors here — providing women lawyers with a support system from the family and society at different stages so that they may not give up on their career, and working towards a positive transformation of the attitudes towards women after they have been entrusted with positions of power and responsibility.Society has been so conditioned to gender-specific roles that it mounts tremendous pressure on women achievers who walk the extra mile. Time has not been able to alter this attitude. William Shakespeare’s character Portia in ‘Merchant of Venice’ who had an astonishing sense of self, yet she had to don the cloak of masculinity to speak in the courtroom to be taken seriously. The irony of Portia as a woman taking it upon herself to fix problems that a man could not solve and taking no credit for the same or not being able to savour her success, being clothed as a man, is played before us time and again in our day-to-day lives at work. While the workplace today is an integral part of women’s lives, there is an unmistakable void in the legislative framework for equality in private workplace in India. medium90129721In this context, inspiration may be drawn from Plato’s ‘Republic’. When the concern was over the wrestling and exercise class in which all candidates who aspired to be elite rulers had to participate in rigorous physical training in the nude according to the Greek custom, Plato concluded that their virtue would clothe the women’s nakedness and the Platonic society would not thereby be deprived of the talent of qualified citizens for reasons of mere gender.Apart from the struggles seeking equality in opportunity in work, a woman has to also tackle the pressure of fitting into the clothes of societal expectations that she has long outgrown, which takes a toll on her emotional health. Women of various cultures and different social strata have been waging a war internally and externally to protect their self-respect and dignity, as they continue to be deified or demonised, just as the woman who had partaken half of Lord Shiva’s form, had incurred his wrath for entertaining an independent opinion. This amorphous relationship between women and the rest of society is a continuum of struggle, pressure and impediment under the facade of overt adulation and legal entitlements afforded.As we celebrate many firsts, a transformation in the attitude towards women will go a long way in reinforcing that women are second to none, if not first among equals. medium90129648The writer is an advocate in Madras high court.