Justice is a Woman

I went to a client meeting today. Alone.

The CFO of the company was explaining the day-to-day functioning of their manufacturing business when he looked at me and said, “You’re a young girl. You won’t understand all this.” I smiled. I didn’t say anything. Mostly because I did understand what he was saying.

The sentence stayed with me. Not because I was offended by the fact that I didn’t know everything about manufacturing. I don’t. He has probably spent more years running a company than I have spent being alive. There are many things I have yet to learn. It was the girl that got me. He could have said, “You’re young.” Instead, I was a young girl. And somehow those two words carried a lot more information than they should have. Now to some of you I might sound like the kind of person who likes to pick on peoples’ words and make big deals out of them. But hear me out. This was after he had referred to me as “ladki” or “bachi”, rather demeaningly multiple times, right in front of me.

I think that is one of the stranger things about being a woman in law.

You spend years trying to become someone people will take seriously. You study. You read. You intern. You learn how to draft. You sit through hearings. You learn how to speak without sounding unsure of yourself. You learn how to sound sure without being called arrogant.

And then you walk into a room and discover that sometimes none of it matters. Sometimes people look at you and see a girl first.

I have seen middle-aged and old men call female judges “Sir”. It is almost funny. Almost. A woman can be sitting on the bench, wearing the robes, presiding over a courtroom full of people waiting for her decision, and somehow Sir still comes more naturally. I don’t think it is a language problem. I think, somewhere in the brain, authority still has a man’s face.

Maybe this is why it is so strange to watch women enter the legal profession in larger numbers. The women arrived before some of the language did.

Literature has been playing around with women and the law for a very long time. Portia was perhaps the first woman lawyer - albeit in fiction. In The Merchant of Venice, she disguises herself as a man and walks into court to argue a case. There is something almost absurd about the entire thing. At a time when women were not allowed on stage or in courts, Shakespeare gave us a woman, played by a man, dressed as a man, pretending to be a lawyer. And she proceeds to have one of the finest hours in the practice of law. I love the irony of it. A woman has to become a man to be allowed into the room, only to prove that she is the smartest person in it.

Lady Justice, apparently, had to borrow a man’s coat.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that men are made uncomfortable by women who have “too much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character.” She wrote that in 1949. It is 2026. We are, unfortunately, still having this conversation.

Because I think we have become very good at talking about violence against women. We talk about sexual violence. Domestic violence. Harassment. Discrimination. We talk about laws that protect women and institutions that are supposed to enforce them. But we don’t talk nearly enough about the women inside those institutions. The women arguing these cases. The women drafting these laws. The women interpreting them. You cannot fight violence against women while erasing women from the institutions that are supposed to fight it.

And this is where the whole thing becomes a little ridiculous.

We tell women to know their rights. Then we are surprised when a woman actually knows them.

We tell women to speak up. Then don’t even try to listen when she does.

We tell women to be ambitious. Then quietly wonder whether anyone will want to marry them.

I have a relative who tells me, every couple of years at a family function, “Lawyer nahi, judge banna. Lawyer ladki se koi shaadi nahi karna chahta.” - Become a judge, not a lawyer. No one wants to marry a lawyer girl. I used to laugh. Now I find myself wondering what exactly we are doing here. I always knew patriarchy existed when women didn’t work. Get married. Have children. Look after the house. Make sure everyone is fed. Remember everyone’s birthdays. Somehow do all of this without calling it work. What I didn’t realise was that once women started having careers, patriarchy would simply develop opinions about those too. Because apparently even our careers need to be assessed for marriageability.

They tell you that once you start working, you understand the price of atta and dal. Nobody tells you that you will also learn the price of being a woman. You learn it in small ways. Someone explaining something to you that you already understand. Someone addressing the question to the man sitting next to you. Someone being surprised that you have an opinion. Someone asking whether you are sure you want such a demanding career. Someone deciding that your ambition is a personality flaw.

And you learn to laugh at these things because individually, they are all too small to make a scene about. That is probably the most exhausting part. Nothing is ever quite bad enough. It is just bad enough to make you wonder if you are imagining it.

You would think that being in a position of authority would eventually get you respect. It doesn’t. Every day, you have to demand it. You have to prove that you know what you are talking about. Then prove it again.

I am still very new to this profession. I don’t want to pretend that I have figured everything out. There will be things I don’t know. There will be meetings where someone has to explain something to me. I want to be allowed all of that. I want to be inexperienced without my inexperience being attributed to my gender. I want to be young without being a young girl. I want to be wrong without it becoming evidence that women don’t belong in the room.

Portia had to disguise herself as a man to get there. We have come a long way since then. I would just like to think that one day, a woman will be able to walk into a courtroom, a client meeting, a boardroom, anywhere really, and not have to spend the first few minutes proving that she belongs there.

And for now, I suppose, I will keep showing up. Even when someone looks at me and sees a girl. Because I know I am a lawyer. I’m just still waiting for everyone else to catch up.