Remarks by President McAleese at the Launch of the Study on Women in Law in Ireland Dublin Castle
Remarks by President McAleese at the Launch of the Study on Women in Law in Ireland Dublin Castle Friday, 24 October 2003
Dia dhíobh a cháirde. Tá áthas orm bheith i bhur measc inniu ar an ócáid speisialta seo.
It is a very particular pleasure to have been invited by my successor as Reid Professor, Ivana Bacik, to join you today and to launch this unique and important Study on Women in Law in Ireland. Thank you all for your warm and generous welcome and at the outset I would like to congratulate and wish Ivana well on her nomination as a candidate in next year’s European elections.
Last time many of us met in this forum I recalled my own experience as an undergraduate law student over thirty years ago. Then, the first recommended text – a book by Professor Glanville Williams entitled “Learning the Law”, contained the kind of crude assertions about women’s unsuitability for the law which would today have its author ridiculed from a height and marginalized in the world of scholarship as an embarrassing misogynist. No such book could today appear on a self-respecting law school’s reading list. It is destined to dwell forever in the realm of social anthropology or women’s studies to assist a new and freer generation to understand and contextualise the troubled journey to the present day. That things have changed greatly is evident. That they have changed greatly for the better for women is manifest but this Study confirms that many of the old prejudices, stereotypes and discriminatory practices are still prevalent today and they are acting as a braking mechanism on the achievement of full equality for women and the fullest potential of our society. What is more, that educated, articulate and ambitious women are still held back in this way, points up even greater difficulties for other cohorts of working women who do not have anything like the same range of advantages or opportunities.
Marian Anderson said-
“As long as you keep a person down some part of you has to be down there holding them down - so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.”
The story of women in law today is a story of unfinished business just as it is in many other spheres of life.
If it were just a simple numbers game then we would probably not be here at all, for drop into any law school today and you will find them dominated numerically by female students. Numbers help of course, for little by little they impact on the legal landscape and change its shape, eroding negative stereotypes, putting women in places once occupied exclusively by men, wearing down the old bastion, building up a more balanced, more egalitarian, more effective profession.
But the sheer weight of numbers and the natural expectations they create of real breakthrough, also makes us righteously impatient with the slow pace of change, for the truth is that while the numbers of women lawyers is steadily increasing, way too few women are to be found in the higher echelons of the legal profession. Only two of the eight judges in the Supreme Court are women and in the High Court just three women appear among the twenty-eight judges. In the Circuit Court it is nine out of thirty-one and eleven out of fifty-three in the District Court. It is disappointing to see in the Study that only 9 per cent of all Senior Counsel are women and that in the academic world only 17 per cent of law professors are women. Time alone may not take care of these imbalances.
The low level of women in decision-making in the legal profession is mirrored in other areas of our society. Women still form only one eighth of our parliamentarians despite being half the electorate. The representation of women on state boards is still well below the target of 40 per cent and the glass ceiling is still very prevalent in the private sector. The general picture, at the moment, points to women having much less control of resources and power in our society than men.
The achievement of equality of opportunity between women and men is a major policy objective at both the national and international level but there are subtleties of structure and complexes of attitudes which we know continue to contribute to the inequality of women and men. As President, I am proud to say that Ireland has one of the most modern equality frameworks in Europe. The Employment Equality Act, 1998, and the Equal Status Act 2000 represent major steps towards a more equal society. And of course, our Constitution provides an overarching commitment to equality for all our citizens.
However, just as passage of time and weight of numbers do not in themselves inevitably conduce to equalization, equality legislation alone will not bring about true equality. There are things in hearts and minds, attitudes and actions which get in the way of true gender equality and deep-rooted change depends on a willingness in both the public and private sectors to adopt the spirit of the legislation and to develop and implement codes of best practice for equality, including gender equality, in the workplace, in professional bodies, in the school, the community and the home.
The Equality for Women Measure, developed under the National Development Plan, is an important positive action initiative for promoting gender equality. The objectives of the Measure include improving women’s access to education, training and employment, the achievement of equality for women in the workplace and business; and the participation of greater numbers of women in decision-making.
The measure has a specific focus on addressing the problems associated with women’s career development and advancement in the workplace and these are problems which persist despite the increase in the numbers of women entering the workforce. This very welcome piece of research on women in law is a very important contribution to the search for answers and solutions to these ingrained gender delineated problems.
The findings in the Study are striking and few, least of all me, would disagree that the greatest obstacle to women’s career progression is the difficulty of achieving work/life balance within the ‘long hours’ culture that is part of today’s law career. It impacts directly on quality of life and quality of family life in particular. Indeed, reconciling work and family life is a crucial issue on the equality agenda. Our current prosperity has led to greater labour market participation for all and considerably widened opportunities for women. But there have been sacrifices and compromises, losses as well as gains, for the old support systems that evolved around a predominantly male workforce are ill suited to a workforce in which both men and women contribute equally and in which quality of life issues are higher on the agenda than ever before. Particularly unacceptable though is the prevalence of overt and covert forms of sexual harassment in workplaces which should be, could be and simply must be exemplars of the highest standards of professional conduct.
I commend the Study to all practitioners of the law, to educationalists and indeed to the wider body politic. I am proud of the fact that women and men of my generation have resoundingly contradicted the skewed thinking articulated so unselfconsciously by Glanville Williams and his generation. But we cannot say we have obliterated it. We owe vindication to the women who never knew choice, whose aspirations and ambitions were drowned out by that overwhelming strident voice that insisted - “You can’t because you are a Woman.” We owe a huge debt to the women who are continuing the journey towards full social inclusion, and doing so courageously despite its pressures, its pitfalls and its obstacles. This Study will help them and their many male supporters to chart a surer path to an Ireland that is soaring on two fully opened wings, an Ireland that for the first time in its history has the chance to realize its fullest, its truest potential - no talent wasted, no-one held down by the cruel power of mindless bias. We are by far the luckiest generation of women yet - for we are closer to that goal than any before and as my granny used to say - we are making our luck. This Study helps!
Go raibh maith agaibh. Thank you.