Page 22 - Judicial Diversity Update report

women is demonstrated by the picture emerging from the gender balance of
the High Court judges who started sitting in October 2019; of the 16
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announcements to date only five (31%) are women.

2.5. It is also important to note that in the case of the High Court, where women
represented 45-46% of the eligible pool, substantially smaller proportions of
women applied than their representation in the pool.

Age and experience at appointment

2.6. Our own data collection indicates that there are encouraging developments
with respect to the age at which women are appointed to the Circuit bench and
High Court, and, for Circuit judges, their years of experience at the time of
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appointment. In the 2017-18 and 2018-2019 rounds, women were appointed
younger and with less experience than male candidates, which offers the
chance to more swiftly correct historic under-representation on the bench.

2.7. For the Circuit bench appointments between 2017 and 2019, on average,
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women were four years younger than men at the time of their appointment
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and it took men three years longer (from qualification) to be appointed.
Women were also significantly less likely to be QCs than men appointed
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during the same time frame.

2.8. For the High Court while there was no statistically significant difference
between men and women in terms of years of post-qualification experience,
women were appointed to the High Court [on average] three years younger

https://www.judicialappointments.gov.uk/jac-official-statistics. We note that one of the appointees did
not declare their gender, hence the discrepancy between our calculation of 50% and the JAC’s figure
displayed in the table (56%).
34 At the time of publication, in mid-January 2020, there have been 16 announcements for 17 new High
Court judges, who started sitting from October 2019. We know that there were 64 applicants, but do not
know the demographic break down of the group.
35 Our own analysis also shows that on average women were appointed as Recorders with three years
fewer post qualification experience than male Recorders in 2018-2019.
36 49.3 years of age for women as opposed to 53.4 years of age for men.
37 29.4 years for men, and 26.3 years for women
38 Only three of the 22 (13%) QCs appointed to this role were women.
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