A CASE FOR CHANGE?

The first female Vice-Dean of Faculty of Advocates on encouraging more women into world of wigs and gowns

When Angela Grahame QC made her first appearance as a qualified advocate she was given a taste of what life was like for female lawyers in Scotland’s courts.

Having gone out to get coffees ahead of a trial at Airdrie court, she returned to hear a “very senior” defence lawyer asking the senior prosecutor she was working with whether they were sleeping together. Neither seemed particularly embarrassed when she interrupted them.

That was 1995 and, while things have improved somewhat, it is fair to say that women are still hugely underrepresented in Scotland’s cohort of court lawyers and, perhaps as a result, under-respected.

Ms Grahame set out to change that when she became Vice-Dean of professional body the Faculty of Advocates in 2016, smashing the mould as the first woman to be competitively elected to the post in the organisation’s 500-year history.

It should come as no surprise, then, that, having stepped down after three and a half years, she has left her mark on an organisation that critics had previously suggested was less a professional association and more an Edinburgh old boys’ club.

The achievement she is most proud of is the action she took to address sexism at the bar by not only making it easier for women and other underrepresented groups to make it into the Faculty in the first place but also to succeed once they got there.

When she began looking at diversity and equality after taking up the vicedeanship, Ms Graham says many Faculty members were happy simply to say the organisation was a meritocracy because they felt they had earned their positions through merit alone.

The figures did not appear to bear this out, though, with men accounting for more than two-thirds of the Faculty’s membership even though they have for many years made up just a third of law school intakes. Representation of ethnic minorities, meanwhile, should also be higher.

To help widen access, Ms Grahame was active in increasing the number of scholarships the Faculty offers and also made it her mission to get out and about to tell people from a variety of different backgrounds why those backgrounds would not in and of themselves be a barrier to a successful career at the bar.

“The Faculty had an ivory-tower reputation, but that’s not really the reality,” she says. “My dad was a plasterer, I didn’t go to private school and no one in my family had ever gone to university. People were quite surprised that the Faculty had elected someone like me.”

But, having visible role models like Ms Grahame or Lady Dorrian, who, as Lord Justice Clerk, is Scotland’s second most senior judge, is not enough when a legal system that was set up by men, for men continues to function in a way that was designed for male working lives.