Every year, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), in a gesture of institutional recognition, celebrates March 10 as the International Day of Women Judges – a performative acknowledgment of the gendered exclusions that continue to define judicial spaces globally.
The move was a result of deliberations at a UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) conference in Doha between February 24 and 27, 2020, where the Institute for African Women in Law (IAWL) called attention to the structural inequalities within judiciaries that render women judges both hyper-visible and invisible – celebrated in rhetoric yet marginalised in practice. The discussions did not merely affirm the need for greater representation but also underscored the systemic bullying, sexual harassment and institutionalised gender bias that shape the everyday lives of women in the judiciary.
On April 28, 2021, the UNGA passed Resolution 75/274 and established the International Day of Women Judges. It was first observed on March 10, 2022. However, does this annual ritual signify anything when the legal profession remains a site of epistemic and material violence against women?
When judicial systems absorb the presence of women judges without transforming their masculinist structures, such commemorations risk becoming spectacles of inclusion rather than instruments of justice. The real test lies not in celebrating women judges but in dismantling the patriarchal architecture of law that continues to police their authority, undermine their legitimacy, and dictate the terms of their presence.
Also read: Indian Courts Are Still a Long Way From Acknowledging Women’s Right to Autonomy
This year, too, the judiciary globally commemorated the day with the usual trappings of institutional self-congratulation – speeches on gender representation, panels on women’s leadership, and solemn invocations of progress. The legal system, which has for centuries resisted the entry of women, will momentarily bask in the glow of inclusion. But inclusion, as feminist jurisprudence reminds us, is a technology of power, not its disruption. The presence of women judges is not necessarily the presence of feminist justice.
This year’s celebrations also occur in the wake of a significant Supreme Court ruling in India. In February 2025, the apex court set aside the dismissal of two women judicial officers, calling for greater workplace sensitivity and fairness. The judgment acknowledged that their removal was unjust and gestured, albeit belatedly, toward the structural hostility that women judges often face. But where does it lead when the legal system “corrects” itself while leaving its foundational biases intact?
Feminist legal scholarship offers us a vocabulary to frame this moment: Is the reinstatement of these judges a recognition of systemic discrimination, or merely a bureaucratic containment of dissent? To answer this, one must move beyond the individual narrative of exclusion to examine how legal institutions discipline women’s presence.
Fictions of merit and neutrality in Indian judiciary
The dismissal – and now reinstatement – of the two women judges cannot be read in isolation. It is symptomatic of a larger structural anxiety about the feminisation of judicial spaces. While the discourse around ‘women in the judiciary’ is framed in the language of meritocracy, the more pertinent question remains – Who gets to define merit?
Hilary Sommerlad (2003) in The “Social Magic” of Merit: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the English and Welsh Legal Profession argues that the legal profession has historically relied on a myth of neutral meritocracy, which obscures how privileges shape access to professional networks. These privileges may be attributed to caste, class, race, gender, disability and other forms of exclusion. The Indian judiciary mirrors this pattern. Women, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds, remain outsiders in the tightly controlled patronage networks of judicial appointments.
The representation of women in India’s higher judiciary remains significantly low, highlighting a persistent gender gap. As of 2023, women constitute approximately 11% of all judges in the Supreme Court and high courts.
Specifically, out of 34 judges in the Supreme Court, only 2 are women. Meanwhile, only 14.27% of high court judges are women (109 out of 764), a stark indicator of the structural barriers that persist in judicial appointments.
Of the eight high courts of India, women’s representation is reduced to a solitary figure – a token rather than a trend.
Moreover, high courts of Uttarakhand, Meghalaya, and Tripura do not have a single woman judge. These numbers are not incidental; they are symptomatic of the deeply entrenched networks of power, patronage, and exclusion that govern access to judicial office. This signifies that women’s presence in the courts remains a statistical afterthought – a reminder that the judiciary’s masculinist architecture resists transformation even as it performs gestures of inclusion.
Even when just stepping into judiciary, women are burdened with excessive representational baggage – they must be competent but not too ambitious, assertive but not aggressive, progressive but not radical. Not to mention, it has long been argued by scholars of anti-discrimination law that mere representation does not equate to substantive equality.
The presence of women, then, is made conditional on their ability to conform to the performance of judicial masculinity.
Disciplining the woman judge
In the said judgment for reinstatement – In Re: Termination Of Civil Judge, Class-Ii (Jr. Division), Madhya Pradesh State Judicial Service (2023) – the bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Justice N.K. Singh dismantled the disciplinary mechanisms wielded against the two women judicial officers in Madhya Pradesh, whose services were abruptly terminated during probation. The rationale for their dismissal – low disposal rates, adverse remarks in the Annual Confidential Report and pending complaints – mirrors the routine deployment of bureaucratic justifications to erase women from judicial spaces.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court, in one petitioner’s case, terminated a woman judge solely on the basis of her “pendency and disposal” rate, without accounting for the structural constraints and practical difficulties that shape judicial work. This hyper-surveillance of women judges, where numerical efficiency is privileged over institutional realities, exemplifies how performance metrics are weaponised to discipline women within the judiciary.
While ordering her reinstatement, the court took cognisance of the arbitrary downgrading of her performance, despite her detailed explanation of the extraordinary circumstances she faced. After an unexpected marriage in 2020, she was tasked with handling a vacant court, a challenge that was neither acknowledged nor accommodated. Her struggles intensified when she was hospitalised in the ICU after contracting coronavirus.
But institutional indifference did not relent. In 2021, her brother was diagnosed with blood cancer, and soon after, she suffered a miscarriage, compelling her to avail a 45-day leave. Instead of recognising these profound personal crises as legitimate grounds for support, the system penalised her for its own lack of structural empathy.
The Supreme Court’s intervention in the dismissal of the two women judicial officers must be situated within a longer history of disciplining women in law. The legal profession, much like other sites of state power, allows women to participate so long as they do not challenge the masculinist logic of law. But the moment a woman judge asserts independence, questions judicial culture or demands structural accountability, she becomes a liability. She is also more harshly judged for her errors while her male counterparts may be more easily forgiven.
Consider the instance of Justice Pushpa Ganediwala, an additional judge of the Bombay High Court, who faced institutional backlash after a series of controversial judgments on child sexual abuse under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. In the so-called “skin-to-skin contact” case, she ruled that pressing a child’s breast without skin-to-skin contact did not constitute sexual assault under POCSO. The judgment was rightly criticised, but what followed was instructive.
Instead of engaging with the deeper structural flaws in judicial training on gender justice, the judiciary withdrew her confirmation for a permanent position in the Bombay High Court. As Sharyn Roach Anleu and Kathy Mack (2009) have demonstrated in their work on judicial authority, women judges are more harshly judged for their errors, while male judges are granted institutional forgiveness.
Justice Indira Banerjee, one of the few women to serve as a judge in the Supreme Court, in a candid interview after her retirement from judicial office, had recounted personal experiences where male colleagues found it difficult to accept female leadership on the bench, leading to instances where her judgments were delayed or obstructed by junior male judges.
Will it ever change?
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when asked about when there would be enough women in the U.S. Supreme Court, famously responded: “When there are nine.” The shock that her statement evoked is instructive. After all, nine men on a bench has never provoked any crisis of legitimacy.
The Indian judiciary continues to evade this question. The judicial performance of former Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud must be read through the prism of the gap between institutional rhetoric and structural transformation. While his tenure was punctuated with the right proclamations on gender diversity and equality, the performative gestures of inclusion did little to alter the masculinist composition of the Supreme Court.
Also read: What Is CJI Chandrachud’s Legacy as Administrator of India’s Judicial System?
The Collegium he led – an elite, opaque body that decides the future of the judiciary – did not recommend a single woman for appointment to the Supreme Court.
The statistics are damning. In his two years as Chief Justice, 17 judges were appointed to the Supreme Court – more than half the sitting strength of the institution. Yet, not a single woman found a place in this landscape of judicial power. Today, the bench remains overwhelmingly male-dominated, with only two women among 32 sitting judges.
This is not merely an oversight. It is a structured reproduction of exclusion, where the rhetoric of gender justice serves as a technique of judicial self-preservation rather than an impetus for genuine reform.
This erasure is neither incidental, nor accidental. The myth of meritocracy continues to function as a gatekeeping mechanism, ensuring that judicial appointments remain insulated from feminist critique and intervention. If institutional memory is shaped by precedent, what does it mean for the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence when its bench is structurally curated to reflect the dominance of men? What does it mean for the idea of justice itself when the very institution that adjudicates gender equality refuses to embody it?
The silence of the collegium in this regard is as revealing as its actions. It tells us that the exclusion of women is not an anomaly – it is a defining feature of judicial institutional culture. Until the architecture of appointments itself is restructured, gender justice in the Supreme Court will remain a spectacle of pronouncements.
The verdict that still awaits
The International Day of Women Judges will come and go. Speeches will be made, panels will be held, and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling will likely be cited as a testament to progress. But the real test of progress is not whether two women judges have been reinstated. It is whether the legal system will confront the structures that enabled their dismissal in the first place.
Until the judiciary is willing to hold itself accountable, the celebration of women judges will remain a mere annual ritual that masks, rather than disrupts, the patriarchal foundations of law.
When there are nine women in the Supreme Court, when high courts are not desperate for “at least one woman judge,” when district courts are not spaces of isolation for the few women who enter – only then will the arithmetic of inclusion give way to structural justice.
The real question we must ask is not how many women are on the bench, but rather, what does the judiciary do to the women who refuse to submit to its patriarchal norms? Until that question is answered, the struggle for feminist justice remains unfinished.
Jhuma Sen is an Advocate practicing at the Calcutta High Court. She is also an Adjunct Faculty at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata, and a Global Fellow, Centre for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, Brown University, USA.
