ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY 2026, the All-India Lawyers' Association for Justice (‘AILAJ’) published a statement titled ‘Taking Gender Justice in the Legal Profession Seriously’. The statement presented the abysmal picture of women’s standing in the Indian legal profession by drawing on official data from the Supreme Court and from Bar Councils across fifteen states. It argues that improvement will require structural change.
The statement arrives at a moment of apparent optimism. Justice B.V. Nagarathna is ever-closer to becoming the first female Chief Justice of India; more women are enrolling in law programmes than at any previous point in the country's history; and the language of gender equality is frequently invoked in bar association speeches and judicial decisions. And yet, the numbers tell a different story.
The numbers
According to data compiled from Bar Councils across fifteen states, 2,84,507 women advocates were registered in India as of 2023, just 15 per cent of the total. The composition of the courts follows a similar pattern. Women occupy 36.3 per cent of positions in the district judiciary, according to Supreme Court data. At the High Court level, only 14 per cent of judges are women. At the Supreme Court, the numbers are smaller still. Since Justice Fathima Beevi became the Supreme Court's first woman judge in 1989, only ten other women have served on the bench in the thirty-six years since.
The governance of the Bar Council of India tells the same story. The Bar Council, a statutory body responsible for regulating the legal profession and legal education across the country, does not have a single woman member in its governing body. Of 441 elected positions across state bar councils nationally, only 9, a mere 2.04 per cent, are held by women.
The causes
The statement identifies several interlocking causes for the persistence of gender inequality in the legal profession. The absence of institutional financial support, denial of reservation, lack of women on judicial panels, deep-rooted stereotypes, and gender blindness.
One of the most significant aspects of the AILAJ statement is its insistence that gender equality cannot be addressed through “caste or class blindness”. Women from Dalit, Adivasi, and other historically marginalised communities face caste-based discrimination within the legal profession in addition to gender-based exclusion, while women from economically weaker sections encounter financial barriers that compound those difficulties. The statement describes this as a “triple discrimination” of gender, caste, and class with religious identity as a further potential axis of marginalisation.
The constitutional principle
AILAJ grounds its statement in the constitutionally mandated fundamental right to equality. It acknowledges that the challenge of gender justice is not only one that AILAJ should demand of others, the organisation must also ensure that such discrimination does not arise within its own ranks. The organisation calls for gender parity in the legal profession by bringing about institutional changes, dismantling patriarchal mindset. It does so by reminding that right to equality, a fundamental tenet of the Indian Constitution, can be realised only when conscious effort is made.
