Justice William Charles Crockett AO - Victorian Bar

to provide answers to the problems thatyoung women are likely to confront in thefuture. We now need to think about themore subtle strategies which may help tochange the hearts and minds of both menand women in the area of gender. Hencethe title of this talk.How do we consolidate past successesand make further improvements?Although there are no simple answers tothis question, I want to talk about fourinter-related strategies which may beuseful to women in general and to womenbarristers in particular. These are:• focusing on cultural and institutionalchange;• cultivating allies;• the importance of leadership; and• the importance of women supportingwomen.66FOCUSING ON CULTURAL ANDINSTITUTIONAL CHANGEThe first strategy requires us to identifyinstitutions and practices in the legal professionand at the Bar which reinforce thestructures of gender and to think abouthow they can be changed. I recently rereadLord Woolf’s report on civil procedurereforms which emphasises the needto win the hearts and minds of practitionersif the huge machine of the civil justicesystem was to be re-calibrated. Gender isa much more entrenched institution thanthe civil justice system and it will take acorrespondingly greater effort to disturbthe pre-conceptions that exist about theappropriate roles of men and women.To deal with issues of culture I thinkit is important to look at both the cultureof masculinity and the culture ofthe legal profession. There is now a largeand fascinating research literature on thetopic of the culture of masculinity, whichmy associate and I have had great funreading. Unfortunately I could not quitedecide how to work in quotes from an articlecalled “Why Marcia, You’ve Changed!Male Clerical Temporary WorkersDoing Masculinity in a FeminisedOccupation.” 14Research on masculinity and workshows that when women begin to enteran area of work in significant numbers,what is seen as men’s and women’s work isredefined. Throughout history men havetended to vacate a field of work whenlarger numbers of women begin to enterit and to find new areas which they candefine as their own. As a result womentend to be segregated into the less prestigiousand well paid areas of the particularprofession or occupation. This pattern isRuth Hamnett, Fiona Ryan and FionaForsythe.already apparent in Law Schools, where Ipredict that the majority of legal academicswill eventually be women.An entertaining example of this phenomenonis described in Joan Eveline’swork on the changes which occurred inthe Western Australian mining industry.When women started to get jobs drivingheavy machinery, which was previouslyseen as “a man’s job” men began to takeon heavier and dirtier tasks, and drivingbig machines came to be seen as a task forwomen. 15It may be worth thinking aboutwhether a similar pattern exists in thelegal profession and at the Bar. In lawfirms my impression is that some youngmale lawyers now see working very longhours as a mark of masculinity, in thesame way that doing dirty work become adefining feature of masculinity in the miningindustry. Young women lawyers oftenadopt these patterns for a time, but I havethe impression from a group of women Ihave recently mentored that, in the longterm, this may well drive them out of privatepractice.The literature I have referred to abovesuggests that women barristers needto think about whether their increasingnumbers have led to the re-emergenceof patterns of gender differentiation. Forexample, are women seen as more suitedto opinion work or to the less lucrativeareas of practice? Do they tend to getbriefed in particular areas such as propertylaw or family law? What is it aboutthe culture of the Bar which results inyoung male barristers having more accessto speaking roles in court than youngwomen? If so how can these patterns ofgender differentiation be changed.CULTIVATING ALLIESIn order to create cultural change it isessential for men and women to worktogether.Many successful women speak of thehelp and support they were given byAnne Sheehan and Caroline Kirton.peers at early stages of their career. In mycase it was at Ron Sackville, now JusticeSackville’s suggestion, that we wrote aproperty law text together. Although hewas only a little more senior than I was,his support gave me the confidence to putmy foot on the first step of the academicladder.Sadly some men in the communitysee themselves as being harmed by theimproved status of women. Discussionof the difficulties which face womenbarristers and women in the workforcesometimes produces hostile or scepticalresponses from men. I was struck by arecent example. In my recent speech atthe Bar Readers’ Dinner, which did notdeal with gender issues at all, I made theoff-the-cuff remark that it was probablystill harder for women barristers than formen to balance work and family responsibilities.A man at the next table muttered,(not particularly sotto voce) “rubbish”. Ifthat response is representative of viewsheld by some men at the Bar, women stillhave a long way to go.When I spoke to women barristers in2001, I referred to Deborah Rhode’s workin the United States, which argued thatthe first step towards gender equality isto convince those in power that thereis actually a problem. Many barristersacknowledge the practical and structuraldifficulties faced by women at the Bar.I think it would be a useful strategy toconvince them to articulate their supportand contribute their advocacy to women’scauses.There are other small ways in whichmale barristers can support women.Most of us have been in situations wherea member of a group makes a racist,homophobic or anti-Semitic comment.I think that many of us are prepared tosay that we object to such comments. Itseems to me to be less common for men toreact adversely to misogynous remarks orcomments which denigrate the achievementsof women barristers. I don’t recall