Lady Hale calls for affirmative action to balance the bench

The courts and judiciary should reflect the the diversity of the UK population, the President of the Supreme Court has said.

Speaking to The Guardian, Lady Hale said she regretted that women were still “seriously underrepresented” in the senior judiciary.

Lady Hale also said she favours affirmative action over positive discrimination as a means of getting more women onto the bench.

When she studied law in the 1960s at Cambridge University there were only six women in her cohort.

“Now, there are more women than men studying law and starting out in the profession,” she said.

She added: “But, as with many professions, there is serious attrition later on. It is not easy to combine practice at the Bar or in a big city solicitor’s firm with family and other responsibilities.

“Many able women move into the government legal and other public sector jobs … This means that fewer remain in the pool from which the senior judiciary are traditionally recruited. So we are still seriously underrepresented at most levels of the judiciary and especially higher up.

“But other sorts of diversity are also important – principally ethnic diversity, where there is still a great deal of work to do, but also diversity in social, economic and professional background.

“The law, the legal profession and the courts are there to serve the whole population, not just a small section of it. They should be as reflective of that population as it is possible to be.”