Secrets of the locker room: why women lawyers fought for the right to use male-only robing areas in court

In the home, it’s the man-cave. On the Tube, it’s those three inches of your seat that the man-spreader splays his legs into. In London society, it’s clubs like The Garrick and White’s that bar women from membership. And in Southwark Crown Court it was the robing room until now.

Male territory sometimes declared, sometimes merely commandeered – is slowly being chipped away at. The latest victory is judge Deborah Taylor’s decree that what was once a men-only space beside the courtroom is now unisex. Female barristers, she says, had been missing out on lawyerly locker room talk.

Southwark hosts most of the capital’s biggest financial crimes trials, including the recent prosecution of the bankers accused of rigging Libor, the interbank lending rate. In court, the robing rooms or advocates’ rooms are where, as one barrister puts it, “we do work between hearings or hide from our clients”. They are used most by criminal practitioners, who are in court more than civil law barristers, and who are more often required to don their wigs and gowns (the convention is you don’t “robe up” before going into the court building). Solicitors aren’t usually invited in, so it can also be the backdrop for horse-trading, where barristers on opposite sides may reach a settlement.

Most courts, such as Snaresbrook and Blackfriars, have communal robing rooms, but Southwark, the Old Bailey and Inner London (in Elephant and Castle) separate the sexes. At Southwark, women had two small rooms at opposite ends of a corridor, while the men had a much bigger space, so if a male silk was defending alongside a female junior barrister, she might miss out on the bartering.

Taylor explains that she had three reasons for her decision, which was made in May but has only just come to light. “Firstly, the male robing room had better facilities including tables and chairs for working. It was unfair to the female barristers to be in cramped rooms. Secondly, there are now far more female barristers involved in fraud cases. Not being in the same robing room meant that they were sometimes excluded from conversations prior to Court which took place between the male barristers. Some said that as a result agreements were made before they were consulted. Thirdly, [it] reinforces that gender should play no part in the role or status of a barrister.” Taylor added that female colleagues had contacted her applauding the change, and no man had yet complained.

To many, the idea there are still single-sex rooms will merely cement their view of the Bar as antediluvian. The four Inns – Lincoln’s, Gray’s, Inner Temple and Middle Temple, to one of which every barrister in England and Wales must belong – can appear even fustier than Oxbridge Colleges. Women only won the right to wear trousers to court in 1995.

And the Bar still has a gender chasm. Every female barrister I spoke to could reel off tales of sexism. One, who specialises in criminal law, describes being a woman at the Bar as “doing everything backwards and in high heels for the same recognition, and all anyone says is: ‘What’s she complaining about? She’s dancing with Fred Astaire.’”

Men dominate the top of the profession. A lack of diversity at the Bar translates into a lack of diversity on the bench: figures published in April showed that only 28 per cent of court judges were women. Last month, Brenda Hale was named the first female Supreme Court president; she has said “it is a priority to achieve better representation of half the human race on the bench.”

When it comes to decisions about how chambers are run, there’s another male-dominated sphere where women are often excluded: the pub. The infamous Bar drinking culture – one lawyer describes his colleagues as “mostly alcoholics and recreational drug-takers” – means young barristers end up in the drinking dens around Temple’s cobbled streets trying to meet solicitors to build their practices, but some of the old hands don’t give up the habit when they become QCs.

“Once you’re a certain age as a woman, you’re less likely to be in the pub – maybe you have children or you just want to be in the gym,” another female barrister tells me. “But lots of decisions about how Chambers gets run are made over a pint – or five. These are things like recruitment: so-and-so is looking for a move, and the first the rest of us hear about it is when it’s announced that we’re taking someone on. That hurts diversity because it’s human nature to replicate yourself in your group of peers.”

It’s never enough, she adds, to go for just a drink. “There’s a time where the ‘work’ gets done – the quote makes are doing some heavy lifting there – and if you’re not there then, you might as well not have been at all. You can’t know when that will be, so it’s always a major piss-up that takes you to 3am. And having an orange juice is basically worse than not going at all.”

The effects of pan-industry problems, like the burden of childcare still falling disproportionately on women, are exacerbated by the fact barristers are largely self-employed. According to Dexter Dias, a QC who used to chair the Bar’s equality and diversity training committee, there’s a “particular attrition point” from seven to 10 years after qualifying: “I just spoke with a young mother at the Bar who told me she had received virtually no support. The profession must prioritise not only the recruitment but the retention of [women]. What’s at stake? The representativeness and hence legitimacy of our legal system. It is not political correctness – it’s a question of the rule of law.”

Industry insiders fear this will become even worse with a new government initiative to extend court hours, that some barristers with children have warned will force them to leave the profession entirely: “It’s a much bigger issue than where you get changed into your quasi sub-fusc.”

An exasperated female barrister adds: “Frankly, it always feels that the entire Bar is viewed as a man’s space by most senior male members. In my years at the Bar, it’s been abundantly clear that it’s easier for men to get ahead, that there is too much secrecy around who gets paid what for the same kind of work, and that there remains a culture of entitlement and arrogance that encourages senior men at the Bar to believe they can get away with anything. That includes inappropriate sexual comments and behaviour. I’ve experienced both, as have many of the junior women I know.”

Men-only spaces are not unique to the Bar, of course, though they are everywhere in decline - both in numbers and in stature. At university, bastions of male privilege are in particular retreat. In the US, Harvard is trying to ban “final clubs” (frat house-members’ club hybrids with names like “The Porcellian”), while in Oxford, The Bullingdon Club has only two members left.

Among supposedly adult institutions, The Garrick – described by one former member as “a shabby tribute to a world that never really existed; its bar is like a locker room filled with drunks” – continues to exclude women, as do White’s in St James’s and The Beefsteak, whose members include the Tory MP Rory Stewart. Though not actively excluded, women may also find less to enjoy in the other kind of gentleman’s clubs (in both instances, a misnomer). Strip clubs, naff as they may be, are where some City lawyers and traders still end up with clients, building bridges among the bosoms.

It’s easy to assume time spent in such clubs is time frittered away. But the problem lies in the fact that this minority of men (already at peak privilege) can get a further leg-up by networking: through the whisper of a job going, through the unquantifiable benefits that arise from dining with the great and the good.

Even in less highfalutin company, after-work drinks can be dominated by men – hence Jeremy Corbyn’s call last year for businesses to end after-hours socialising because it discriminates against mothers (the bigger problem there being that childcare is often deemed to be women’s work). Additionally, men simply have more mechanisms for spending time with each other than women do, even if female networks and clubs are now trying to close this gap.

Sometimes, though, it’s an internal barrier that stops women being fully involved in the conversation. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, once hosted a meeting of top tech execs for the then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. In her book Lean In, she recalls that when she asked attendees to take a seat, most of the men sat at the conference table; Geithner’s team, all women, “sat in chairs off to the side”. They seemed, she noted, “like spectators rather than participants... It was a moment when I realized that in addition to facing institutional obstacles, women face a battle from within.”

Occasionally too, we women may assume we’re not welcome even when we are. In my first job in journalism, I was the only woman in my reporting team. When the men traipsed off to the pub at lunch (the glory days!), I worried I would be intruding. Eventually, I spoke to a male colleague, who laughed: “Of course we want you there – you stop us looking like a bunch of sad old men.”