More men hating women because they are women….
The Guardian
She has been called a ‘brave disruptor’ by campaigners and ‘rabid’ by internet critics. But for Charlotte Proudman, only one opinion matters: that of the women and children she defends in the family courts
At lunchtime, when she is working at her barristers’ chambers in central London, Charlotte Proudman, a specialist in family law, faces a confronting choice. Should she nip around the corner to Pret a Manger or join her colleagues at the Middle Temple dining hall? It’s not so much a question of whether she feels like a sandwich or a sit-down meal, but a more existential decision, requiring her to analyse who she is and where she belongs.
It is 15 years since Proudman qualified as a barrister, but she still feels a sense of alienation when she walks into the formal dining halls. “It’s largely a sea of male, pale, stale figures sitting there, all in their suits. They all look identical, and are probably from similar demographic backgrounds. As a woman, you already stand out,” she says when we meet at her deserted offices on Good Friday. “It feels like a pocket of establishment elitism. In Pret you’ll have a mixture of solicitors, some paralegals, maybe some judges popping in and out; it’s more cosmopolitan.”
Since she started eating at Middle Temple, Proudman, 36, has repeatedly been surprised by the questions the mostly male diners lob in her direction. When she began her career at the bar, she found that it was “by some distance, the most male environment I had ever encountered”. Often the men begin by remarking that she has an accent, and start hazarding inaccurate guesses about where she’s from.
“They suggest Leeds or Yorkshire and I’m not from any of those places – but it’s almost as if they’re making a point of the fact that I don’t belong, that I’m an outsider,” she says, adding that almost no one has heard of Leek, the market town where she grew up, near Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire.
When she first qualified, she would be asked where she had studied at university; older barristers, she says, were nonplussed when she said Keele. Occasionally they asked her what her father did for a living; she avoided saying that he was an alcoholic who died in a car crash when she was four. She was unsettled by their shared cultural reference points. “I know it sounds funny, but everyone’s gone skiing, everyone goes to the opera. They have these extracurricular activities which I’ve just never done.”
You can understand why Pret might begin to seem the logical choice.
Proudman’s unease echoes that felt by Brenda Hale, the first female president of the supreme court, when she moved from Yorkshire to London to start at the bar, and found herself surrounded by men she privately called “quadrangle to quadrangle to quadrangle boys” – lawyers who had been at independent boarding schools, then Oxbridge and the Inns of Court in London, their lives bounded by similar architecture and privilege.
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