Towards an Inclusive Bar: Why India's women lawyers are litigating their way into the Bar
In 2021, only 9 of 441 elected representatives across India's State Bar Councils were women. So women advocates did what they knew best; they went to Court.
Miriam Fozia Rahman
8 March 2026
THE YEARS SPENT IN COURTROOMS have helped me realise the difference between what the law says and what institutions actually do. The legal profession in India speaks fluently about equality. It writes it into petitions, argues it before benches, and invokes it in closing statements. What it has been far less willing to do is practise it internally.
This year, the elections to the Bar Council of Delhi witnessed an unusually high participation by women advocates. The surge follows a series of judicial interventions mandating reservations for women in Bar Associations. I will not pretend this happened organically. It did not. It happened because women went to court to make it happen.
Women constitute almost half of India’s population, yet their representation in the institutions of law continues to be a matter of concern. More than seven decades after independence, the number of women judges in the Supreme Court of India have accounted for only about 3.83 percent of all judges who have served on the Court. Today, out of a sanctioned strength of thirty-four judges, there is only one woman who is also expected to become India’s first woman Chief Justice.
At present, no woman is an office bearer in the Bar Council of India. That is a structural outcome and structures do not correct themselves.
This lack of representation penetrates beyond the bench and into the institutions like Bar Councils that regulate elections, welfare schemes, disciplinary proceedings, and professional leadership. At present, no woman is an office bearer in the Bar Council of India. That is a structural outcome and structures do not correct themselves. Without structural intervention, such imbalances tend to reproduce themselves.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman judge of the Supreme Court of the United States once responded to a similar question,“... when I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.”
Courts begin correcting the gender imbalance
Let me be clear about what I mean when I say progress. I do not mean that the problem is solved. I mean that we have finally moved from a situation where the profession refused to acknowledge the problem at all, to one where at least some courts are willing to name it.