Women lawyers had to act together to look after themselves in the face of inequality, according to former High Court judge Mary Gaudron.
“While ever men gather in private clubs, where women are excluded, and there discuss future appointments [to the judiciary] and their prodgeny, women have got to work together to look out for themselves because they are looking after themselves over lunches at the Australia Club,” she told the inaugural Australian Women Lawyers conference in Sydney yesterday (Friday 29 September).
The president of AWL, Victorian barrister Caroline Kirton, told the conference that women were poorly represented in major cases.
Women made up only 5.8 per cent of appearances by senior counsel in the Federal Court. The appearance of the average male senior counsel was 119.7 hours; for females it was just 2.7 hours. For junior barristers the figures were 223.6 hours against just 1.4 hours.
Justice Gaudron said women were discouraged from going to the Bar because of the knowledge that advancement depended as much on social and family contacts, patronage and tribal mentality than merit.
She encouraged female lawyers not to be frightened of telling their male counterparts how they felt. They should invite them to functions and to drinks in their chambers to tell them and to show them that “you are not a hydra-headed monster; you have a sense of humour and you are not a hairy-legged lesbian”.
She said equality did not mean uniformity or sameness. The principle of equality was to pay attention to relevant differences, such as talent and merit, but ignore irrelevant differences, such as race, religion and sex.
On international law, she called for international appellate courts to ensure equality and uniformity in the application of international treaties. Often national courts were inconsistent.
The appellate courts would deal in things like maritime law as well as the equal and consistent application of treaties on refugees and matters like the rights, guilt or innocence of people at Guantanamo Bay.