As I was studying the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Women in Public Service Project and the Global Women’s Leadership Initiative Index, I decided to research women’s presence in the judiciaries of various countries. In terms of evaluating women’s presence in that domain, presence in the civil service, the attainment of university degrees, and presence in the decision-making civil service could all be important indicators. However, the data present for these indicators was most complete among developed countries. Countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and France had complete data, with which the position of women in both parliamentary houses and the civil service could be established. Concerning countries like Albania, for example, the data was shown to be far from complete, and only GWLI indicators such as the literacy rate, marriage rate, and the presence of women in the civil service were shown. For a country like France, however, the GWLI index included indicators such as women in the civil service, women with post-secondary education, and women in the workforce, thereby demonstrating that the evaluation of such indexes can be limited by the economic development of the country. There is also a distinction concerning women’s presence in a nation’s civil service, as the presence of women in the civil service as a whole is consistently disproportionately larger than the presence of women in “decision making in civil service” roles. As such, many of these nations reflect what the “Roadmap to 50×50: Power and Parity in Women’s Leadership” terms “flat parity,” in that women work in a variety of different capacities, but they are nonetheless largely prevented from obtaining positions of leadership. Furthermore, the presence of women in “decision making in civil service” roles does not adequately reflect the presence of women in the judiciary, as in France, women hold only thirty percent of “decision making civil service” roles while, according to the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, women constitute 70.9 percent of the judiciary.
The website of the National Association of Women Judges also furnishes a state-by-state breakdown of women in state-level courts, showing the prevalence of women in the judiciary throughout the United States, and giving a sense of gender equality on a state by state basis. Overall, women constitute only 34 percent of the United States judiciary as of 2019. The United Kingdom also has a low rate of women judges, as a 2019 article in The Guardian, entitled: “Lady Hale: at least half of UK judiciary should be female” by Diane Taylor shows that only 29 percent of judges in lower courts are women, although the number of women judges increases among higher courts. It can be assessed that the disparity between the prevalence of women in parliaments and women in the judiciary can be caused by the necessity of appointments to enter the judicial system. While certain countries may have incentives and policies to ensure gender equality in the court system, such policies may not translate to an effective implementation of policies that foster gender equality at the national level. Furthermore, the different structures of each level of a given judiciary may make certain branches more resistant to change and more independent from the central government. While measuring the presence of women in the judiciary would likely be less challenging than evaluating gender equality in more private aspects of life, such as home life. However, the structural differences between tiers of courts in a country must be contended with, and the prevalence of women at higher levels does not necessarily indicate an increase in gender equality at the national level. While the availability of education and economic freedom may hinder women from entering the judicial system in developing countries, the greatest obstacle in developed countries would seem to be the necessity of appointments to enter the judiciary, and a potential reluctance on the part of local authorities to alter a male-dominated establishment.