Here’s the introduction to the piece. Looks like there will need to be some serious banging of heads to get much movement in the Australian legal profession.
All who know it are aware how ingrained stone age attitudes are and the men who runs the boys club will quietly fight tooth and nail to slow change….
One month on from “bombshell” allegations a former justice of the High Court sexually harassed female associates, four prominent legal women addressed the power-based struggles that led to the toxic culture and discussed how to transform the profession.
Only a month ago, the Honourable Chief Justice Susan Kiefel revealed the allegations of sexual harassment against one of the High Court’s own in a “powerful statement” – in doing so, spurring the profession into action to address its power-based culture that led to the prevalent, but mostly secretive, sexual harassment in the legal profession.
Fran Kelly, an Australian radio presenter and political correspondent hosting a UNSW Law webcast, said what really struck her as an outsider to the profession was “the realisation that harassment in the law is rife. It is rife and is known and yet it still goes on”.
According to Newcastle Law School’s senior lecturer Dr Kcasey McLoughlin, the legal profession’s harassment has been shaped by its history and exclusion of women – not to mention the exclusionary terms in cases of race, sex and wealth status.
“A woman’s entry into the profession was not easy at all,” Dr McLoughlin said. “There was huge resistance and if we revisit some of those arguments, the idea was that law wasn’t going to be an appropriate profession because of women’s reported intellectual inferiority and that they would be too sexually tempting to men.”
Even though women have entered the legal profession in significant numbers – having outnumbered men for some time – Dr McLoughlin said those historic power structures have still not changed and has, “by and large, stayed the same”. It speaks to the issue that the onus is still on the individual as the least powerful person in the room
