Female QC applicants fall by a third
updated on 08 March 2013
The number of applications for Queen's Counsel (QC) status submitted by female barristers has dropped by a third this year.
QC Appointments board statistics, as reported by The Lawyer, show that of the 186 QC applications submitted this year, only 26 (14.2%) were from female barristers. Women accounted for 18% of QC applications in 2011-12 and 16% in 2010-11. Meanwhile, the number of QC applications by barristers from ethnic minority backgrounds has increased this year from 15 in 2011-12 to 21 (11.5% of this year's total QC applications).
Equality and diversity campaigners will find all of these figures underwhelming, while the president of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, admitted last night in an interview broadcast on the BBC that "white, public-schooled men" are severely overrepresented at the Bar. Neuberger has also recently admitted that the gender imbalance at the higher levels of the legal profession could be a result of an institutionalised "unconscious bias" against women.
