A top civil servant today called for more female judges and greater diversity in the legal profession as she warned that ministers needed to act to help talented women thrive.
Dame Ursula Brennan, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Justice, said attitudes in Whitehall had changed from the “culture of bottom-pinching” that she experienced when she joined the civil service in 1975.
But she warned that the judiciary remained “male-dominated” and that greater efforts were needed to ensure that more able women were given the opportunity to reach the summit of the legal profession.
She added that she had also come to realise during her career that the idea that “men and women will just thrive” was not “quite like that” and would only occur if “senior people” worked to promote equal opportunities. Dame Ursula’s comments, in an interview with The Times, came as she marked the completion of her first year as the most senior mandarin in the Ministry of Justice.
She said the civil service, which has women in 37 per cent of its senior posts, had a good record, but warned that the judiciary was failing to recruit enough women to its highest ranks as insufficient diversity lower down reduced the pool of potential candidates.
“You wander round the Royal Courts of Justice and the senior levels of the judiciary are still male-dominated,” she added. “What the judiciary needs to do, and are doing, is get to a position where there are more women in the Court of Appeal so that there are more women ready and able to move onwards.”
