An opportunity expressly denied to women
Amelia Gentleman in the Guardian three years ago:
Over 100 QCs have signed a petition calling on members of one of London’s last remaining gentlemen’s clubs, the Garrick, to vote for women to be admitted at the club’s annual general meeting next week.
The Garrick has a long association with the legal profession, and many senior lawyers are members. Female QCs who signed the petition expressed frustration that a club frequented by senior judges still refuses to accept female members.
So in that sense the Garrick isn’t really all that “private.” It’s useful for professional advancement, and that’s not exactly “private.”
“It is well known that The Garrick is a forum where senior members of the legal profession socialise with each other. Men are afforded an opportunity through their membership to form connections with senior legal practitioners to support their professional aspirations,” the petition states.
“This is an opportunity expressly denied to women and contributes to the gross underrepresentation of women at the top of the legal profession. We urge the Garrick’s members to consider whether they would remain members of a club that excluded based on race, religion, or sexuality.”
Before you shout some more about the Garrick’s absolute right to continue excluding women please note that the petition says “We urge the Garrick’s members to consider.” It’s not a violation of liberal principles to urge people to consider things.
Some QCs left messages beneath the petition describing their anger at colleagues’ membership of the club, and the unease they felt at having to attend dinners there as a guest. One senior female barrister, with 30 years experience, said that case dinners at the Garrick were “frequent”, and seemed to form part of invisible pattern of networking between male colleagues.
Another said the links between senior judges and the Garrick “have long played a part in creating a misogynistic atmosphere that makes it less likely that women will want to pursue careers to the highest level and, if they do, less likely that they will be successful. The Garrick’s insistence on all-male membership plays an important and corrosive role in confirming these gender distinctions”.
The former president of the supreme court Baroness Hale, who was the first woman among 12 supreme court judges (several of whom were then Garrick club members), criticised the club’s continued exclusion of women in 2011. “I regard it as quite shocking that so many of my colleagues belong to the Garrick, but they don’t see what all the fuss is about,” she told a law diversity forum. She said judges “should be committed to the principle of equality for all”.
Judges of all people.
The idea that women have places that exclude men, so they should have this right fails on at least one count: the places women have are places where they are vulnerable. They are not centers of power, they are not useful for forming networks within a power structure that has excluded them for so long. It’s just like separate but equal: separate, but by no means equal.
In the 1980’s I had a co-worker whose mother owned a KFC franchise in Metairie, Louisiana. She successfully sued to be admitted to one of the local Fraternal Organizations (I don’t remember which one, whether it was the Moose Lodge, or the Lions, or Oddfellows,) and won on appeal for precisely this reason. She was a business owner and the appeals court ruled that since the orders served for networking and deal-making, their exclusion of women was discriminatory. I tried to find the actual case, but my Google Fu skills are insufficient.
Interesting!
Might it also play a role in the lenient sentences given for violent crimes against women? Might it be connected with the forcing of female victims to call their male assailants “she” in court? I can’t see how it would help.
I suppose it could in theory motivate them to overcompensate, but they don’t, so…
I would love to know what would happen if one of the members did an Izzard and started identifying as a woman.
I’m not sure exactly what a “case dinner” is, but if work is discussed it would be in breach of the Garrick’s rules which state that “[n]o part of the clubhouse may be used for business purposes, which includes discussing business matters.” (This would of course rule out a challenge along the lines of that outlined by Mike Haubrich #2)
I wonder if that rule relies on a distinction between business and The Professions. No discussing vulgar money-making, but discussion of The Law is another thing altogether?