Female judges ‘make better decisions’
FEMALE judges improve justice, the first female president of the Supreme Court has said.
Baroness Brenda Hale, Britain’s most senior judge, used an interview with the New Zealand Herald to ask: “Do women make different decisions from men? To which the answer is: having women on the court improves the quality of decision-making.”
Baroness Hale, who is visiting New Zealand for the Law Society’s Women in Law summit, said: “It improves the quality of debate. It makes certain things much more difficult to say and do, counters subconscious biases – we all have them – and just, from time to time, having a woman’s voice on a decision makes a difference.”
She added: “However much people respect one another, women do lead slightly different lives from men, and that perspective in experience is a valuable one to have around decisionmaking generally.”
Baroness Hale, 73, graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1966, having been one of only six female law school students studying there at the time. “At that stage, the first woman High Court judge in England had only just been appointed,” she said. The selfconfessed “soft feminist” has long been an outspoken critic of perceived sexual bias within the legal system. In 2013, she said “unconscious” sexism among legal elites was leading to women being overlooked for top jobs by interviewers who felt more comfortable speaking with men.
The proportion of female judges in the UK stands at 28 per cent among court judges and 45 per cent among tribunal judges – one of the lowest rates in Europe.
The former family court judge said more should be done to attract women to serve on the bench. “The issue that can’t be ignored and ought to be an issue for men as well but, in practice, is more of an issue for women, is having children,” she added.
“Do employers think that a woman who takes any time off for their family is less committed to the job or do they realise she’s probably more committed?”