At least four judges resign from men-only Garrick Club after backlash, Exclusive: Move comes amid increasing pressure over influential figures’ ties to organisation that bars women by Kevin Rawlinson and Amelia Gentleman, 25 Mar 2024, The Guardian
- ‘It isn’t acceptable’: Garrick Club remains a bastion of male elitism
- Legal profession’s most powerful among members of Garrick Club
At least four senior judges have resigned from the men-only Garrick Club, the Judicial Office has said, as men in the legal profession come under increasing pressure over their close association with an organisation that has repeatedly blocked attempts to allow women to join.
The office confirmed that the appeal court judge Sir Keith Lindblom and the high court judges Sir Nicholas Cusworth, Sir Nicholas Lavender and Sir Ian Dove had resigned.
A spokesperson added that it was possible more had done so but had not reported such to the Judicial Office, which provides training and human resources advice to the judiciary in England and Wales.
The four judges were among dozens in the legal profession now known to have been members. Their number included a further four appeal court judges, five more high court judges, dozens of serving and retired judges, current and former ministers in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and numerous senior solicitors.
Their resignations followed those of the head of the civil service, Simon Case, and the MI6 chief, Richard Moore. They had faced intense criticism of their decision to join the club in the first place, and their decisions to leave last week placed further pressure on those then retaining membership.
The news follows the publication of an open letter signed by more than 80 lawyers in England and Wales that called on judges to give up their memberships, calling them “incompatible with the core principles of justice, equality and fairness”.
Dr Charlotte Proudman, who coordinated the open letter along with her fellow barrister Elisabeth Traugott, said signatories were calling on colleagues to resign from the club – and for the club to allow women to join.
“I hope that we see a domino effect, with more and more people slowly starting to resign. And I certainly hope by the end of this week that all of the judges have resigned from the Garrick Club. And, if they haven’t, well we’ll have to see what’s next,” she told Sky News on Monday morning.
Speaking after the news of the latest judicial resignations emerged, Proudman said: “In light of the Bar Council’s reports on the under-representation of women at the bar and in the ranks of senior judiciary, the gendered disparity on earnings, and the striking gender difference in retention, progression, job satisfaction and wellbeing when it comes to women – especially those from non-white, non-traditional backgrounds – we have real issues to confront when it comes to improving gender equality and equity at the family bar.
“Private membership of this club is not compatible with public expressions of support for gender parity of pay and promotion. Words expressing support for gender equality are cheaper than membership of the Garrick, it appears.”
Separately from the open letter, Karon Monaghan KC, a barrister specialising in equality and human rights law, has written in a comment piece for the Guardian that “judges being members sends a message, including to female lawyers and judges, that powerful places are manly places”.
Helena Kennedy, a barrister and Labour member of the House of Lords, has argued for a US-style system that would bar judges from joining the Garrick. The US federal code of conduct for judges says they “should not hold membership in any organisation that practises invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin”, adding that such membership “gives rise to perceptions that the judge’s partiality is impaired”.
Golly Justice! Look at those Garrick Club Cavemen judges! Mostly Old White Men!
Legal profession’s most powerful among members of London’s men-only Garrick Club, Exclusive: Roll-call of gentlemen’s club, which bars women, includes judges, barristers and ministers by Amelia Gentleman, Mar 19, 2024, The Guardian
- UK’s top civil servant and MI6 head urged to quit Garrick Club
- Garrick Club’s members list reveals roll-call of British establishment
- ‘It isn’t acceptable’: Garrick Club remains a bastion of male elitism
Some of Britain’s most powerful judges, including a serving member of the supreme court, along with about 150 leading barristers, are members of the Garrick Club, which has repeatedly blocked attempts to allow women to join.
The roll-call of the legal profession also includes five appeal court judges, eight high court judges, dozens of serving and retired judges, current and former ministers in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and numerous senior solicitors.
The Garrick gentlemen’s club has close association with the legal profession, but the full extent of those ties has never previously been made clear. I wonder why~!Members say senior judges gather regularly at the club’s communal dining table.
“Business is not meant to be discussed in the club – but it is,” one former member said.Of course it is, I expect lawyers and judges share legal tricks on how to let rapists off, again and again and again, while punishing and revictiming the victims, and laughing all the way to, from and in the club. “Ha ha ha ha ha, pour me another scotch.”
The memberships of judges from England and Wales, revealed in a Guardian investigation, provoked anger from female lawyers.Made me angry too, we have the same type of crude misogynistic judicial-legal hanky panky shit in Canada.
Helena Kennedy, a barrister and Labour member of the House of Lords, said: “We should be outside the door with banners. It should be mentioned to senior level judges, who are supposed to promote fairness and equality, that it’s not appropriate to be in a club that does the opposite.”
The first female president of the UK supreme court, Brenda Hale, has previously expressed shock at how many eminent judges are members of the Garrick. She said judges “should be committed to the principle of equality for all”.
Christopher Bellamy, a Conservative peer and parliamentary under secretary of state in the MoJ, is a member alongside his Conservative colleagues Robert Buckland and Michael Gove, both former justice secretaries, and the former attorney general Dominic Grieve.
Several of the country’s most senior judges are members, including the supreme court judge David Richards, the appeal court judges Julian Flaux (head of the chancery division), Keith Lindblom (senior president of the tribunals), Andrew Moylan, Peter Coulson and Charles Haddon-Cave (chair of the independent inquiry on Afghanistan).
Garrick members often argue that they gain no professional advantage from membership because rules prohibit using the club for work. Pfffft. Since when do judges or lawyers heed the rules?Others point out that they voted for women’s admission in 2015, when 50.5% of members were in favour, falling short of the two-thirds majority required for a rule change. A new vote is expected to be held in June.Won’t that be funny to read the results
Lady Kennedy said these arguments were beside the point. “The ice-cream tie they wear is a statement about exclusivity. It says: ‘I belong to a very special group of people.’ And that is about power. To exclude women from those arenas of power is unacceptable,” she said. The Garrick tie has salmon pink and cucumber green stripes.
The US federal code of conduct for judges states that they “should not hold membership in any organisation that practises invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin”, adding that such membership “gives rise to perceptions that the judge’s partiality is impaired”.
“We should set out a similar set of principles to what they have in the US,” Kennedy said.
Lady Hale, who was supreme court president until her retirement in 2020, repeatedly called out her colleagues for their membership.
“I regard it as quite shocking that so many of my colleagues belong to the Garrick, but they don’t see what all the fuss is about,” she told a law diversity forum.Of course not, they’re men in a Patriarchal world where judges set rapists free, again and again and again, even those that admit to their rapes.
The concentration of lawyers and judges in the club gave members access to gossip and knowledge that non-members could not access, she said in a 2017 interview. “My objections to the Garrick is not to a men-only club. It’s to judges being members of a men-only club. They wouldn’t dream of being members of a club that excluded people from ethnic minorities [or] a club that excluded gays, but for some reason they seem to think it’s OK to be members of a club that excludes women.”That’s ’cause they’re men, likely quite a number of them rapists.
High court judge members include Robert Miles, William Trower, Nicholas Hilliard, Christopher Butcher, Nicholas Lavender, Nicholas Cusworth, Robert Hildyard and Ian Dove.
Three deputy high court judges – Philip Havers, James Strachan and James Lewis – and at least a dozen circuit judges also belong to the club, as do the two lords David Neuberger, a former president of the supreme court, and Jonathan Sumption, a retired supreme court judge.
The club is symbolic of wider diversity problems within the judiciary. Official judicial organisations are sensitive about the slow progress towards introducing greater diversity into the profession, despite years of initiatives trying to do so.
An increase in the number of women studying law at university has meant that 59% of new junior barristers are women, but that ratio declines within the first five years of practice, in part due to the challenges the profession poses to parents. Only 20% of king’s counsels (KCs), the most senior barristers in England and Wales, and just two of the supreme court’s 12 judges, are women.
Although most of the judges who are Garrick members are in their 60s and 70s, the club continues to attract much younger lawyers at earlier stages of their careers, and a number of new KCs have joined in recent years.
Bar Council research has shown that male lawyers’ earnings are higher than women’s at every level of the profession, with women earning 17% less in the first three years of work and the differential stretching to 30% at 11–15 years. The research suggested the difference in earnings between men and women was not narrowing. It also found that the average black barrister earned markedly less than the average white barrister.
A government paper on diversity in the judiciary found that “individuals from an Asian/Asian-British or black/black-British background were less likely to be recommended for appointment relative to white candidates”.
“It has been 103 years since women were publicly granted entry to the bar, yet the tradition of exclusion on the basis of gender continues in private,” said a spokesperson for Her Bar, a new group working to support women’s careers as barristers that was launched by Nasreen Shah and Rachel Bale.
“This wilful exclusion of women from networking spaces has a profound effect on women at the bar, and often has the desired effect of triggering impostor syndrome, preventing women from even trying to penetrate a world that is wholly unwelcoming.”
Lawyers and campaigners have repeatedly attempted to raise the issue of the club’s membership rules, without success. Two years ago more than 300 senior lawyers signed an online petition at womenatthegarrickclub.org claiming the club contributed to “the gross under-representation of women at the top of the legal profession”.
Some female lawyers believe their male colleagues’ membership of the Garrick could have an impact on their sensitivity to legal issues affecting women.
John Mitting, the chair of the public inquiry into undercover policing examining the abuse of women by police spies, was called out for his Garrick membership at the inquiry’s opening session in 2020.Fuck, that’s disgusting and deeply creepy.
Questioning his ability to tackle issues of institutional sexism, Phillippa Kaufmann KC said: “Like many high court, supreme court, court of appeal judges, you’ve been a member of the Garrick Club, which expressly excludes women from membership.”
Andrew McFarlane was a member of the club in 2017. He was appointed to head the family division and head of family justice in 2018 and stopped being a member of the club at about that time.
The judges and ministers were contacted for comment. A spokesperson for the judiciary said: “The judiciary does not comment on the personal affairs of individual judges.”Coward!
Buckland said the club was a place where members socialised and business was not discussed. Triple Pffft! Just another circle jerker. I don’t believe Buckland.
The Garrick was also approached for comment.
Additional reporting by Morgan Ofori
No equality for working women in any country in the world, study reveals, Global gender gap is far bigger than previously thought, as annual World Bank report takes childcare and safety issues into account for first time by Kaamil Ahmed, Mar 25 2024, The Guardian
No country in the world affords women the same opportunities as men in the workforce, according to a new report from the World Bank, which found the global gender gap was far wider than previously thought.
Closing the gap could raise global gross domestic product by more than 20%, said the report.
For the first time, the bank investigated the impact of childcare and safety policies on women’s participation in the labour market in 190 countries. It found that when these two factors were taken into account, women on average enjoyed just 64% of the legal protections men do, down from the previous estimate of 77%.
Report author Tea Trumbic said childcare and safety issues particularly affected women’s ability to work. Violence could physically prevent them from going to work, and childcare costs could make it prohibitive.
The 10th edition of the women, business and the law report, published on Monday, also for the first time assessed the gap between laws and the policies put in place to implement them. It found countries had, on average, established less than 40% of the systems needed for full implementation.
While 95 countries enacted laws on equal pay, only 35 had measures in place to ensure the pay gap was addressed. Globally, women earned just 77 cents of each dollar earned by a man.
Many sub-Saharan African countries had seen rapid progress in the reform of laws in recent years, said the study, but had the largest gap between legislation and implementation.
Togo had the highest number of laws in sub-Saharan Africa, giving women 77% of the legal rights of men, but had structures in place to implement just a quarter of them.
“We’ve seen a consistent reform effort from several African countries … this year the report really highlights Togo and Sierra Leone that had really big shifts in the last three to four years,” said Trumbic. “But the supportive frameworks are largely lacking. So that’s why the implementation gap is even larger in countries that reformed recently because they’ve raised the standard in their laws, but they don’t have the supportive mechanisms to implement them.”
Addressing the childcare gap would immediately lead to a 1% increase in women’s participation in the labour force. The report said less than half the countries had financial support or tax relief for parents of young children and less than a third had quality standards in place for childcare that could assure parents of their children’s safety.
In 81 countries, a woman’s pension benefits do not account for periods of work absences related to childcare.
The report said that while 151 countries had laws against sexual harassment in the workplace, only 40 had laws that covered abuse in public areas or on public transport, meaning women were not protected on their way to work.
“All over the world, discriminatory laws and practices prevent women from working or starting businesses on an equal footing with men,” said Indermit Gill, chief economist of the World Bank Group. “Closing this gap could raise global gross domestic product by more than 20% – essentially doubling the global growth rate over the next decade – but reforms have slowed to a crawl.”
Refer also to:
Jacqueline Horvat@LSOTreasurerLSO is Ontario’s legal industry’s self-regulator Mar 25, 2024:
Recent stories in the media about ongoing sexual harassment in the legal profession prompted many of my colleagues to reach out to me expressing their concerns. I am deeply troubled by the continuing incidence of sexual harassment, violence and discrimination in legal workplaces. I want to reinforce, for those lawyers and paralegals who are experiencing sexual harassment, violence or discrimination, that the Law Society has supports to help, including the Discrimination and Harassment Counsel program. The Law Society also has proactively made changes to the complaints process to assist complainants who wish to pursue formal discipline processes by offering trauma-informed supports
Although it can be painful and risky for victims to share their experiences of harassment, violence or discrimination, conversations and increased awareness about their experiences are critically important. Ending the silence and stigma that allows harassment and discrimination to continue is the first step to make legal workplaces free of harassment and discrimination. I am hopeful that these conversations will launch a collaborative response from all leaders in the legal community as well as employers of lawyers, paralegals and licensing candidates throughout the province.
Paulsparalegal@paulsparalegal:
Individuals regardless of being a lawyer or judge MUST be held accountable
No one should be or think they are above the #RuleofLaw
“It’s the judges!” enabling rape and murder of women. No kidding. In Canada too.
“Unf*ck the system.” Alberta’s Neanderthal “Justice” system assaults sexual assault victims. “The judge in this troubling case was none other than former Deputy Justice Minister Ray Bodnarek, a PC loyalist appointed as a judge by former PC Justice Minister Jonathan Denis who himself resigned under troubling allegations of domestic violence.” Commenter: “So who exactly is the crown protecting by blocking the publication of the victim’s name?” Another commenter: “My guess…..the ‘system’. It stinks and it’s all because of the judges & lawyers.” 
I believe the only way to start unravelling patriarchy and cleaning up Canada’s corrupt politicians, lawyers and judges, is to make it illegal for a lawyer (past, current, future) to be an MLA or MP in our provincial or federal gov’ts. Let lawyers practice/teach law, let politicians make laws, don’t mix the two – that includes no judges in politics either.
