The Missing Bench: The Stark Gender Divide That Plagues India’s Courtrooms

Mahalakshmi Pavani secured the third rank in her advocate-on-record examinations in 2005, qualifying her to practice in the Supreme Court of India. Just ten years later, she was designated a senior counsel—an elevation that takes over 15 years of SC practice in most cases. Then, in 2021, the High Court and Supreme Court collegium recommended her for judgeship. But, the Karnataka Bar Council—her home council— rejected her…thrice. The KBC threatened to go on strike if Pavani was elevated to judgeship. That was a turning point for her.

“My own experience of being rejected despite my credentials—born, brought up, and educated in Karnataka—has led me to argue passionately for gender parity. Notably, I advocated for this cause even before a five-judge bench during the NJAC hearings. The lack of support from my colleagues and the Bar was disconcerting, but it strengthened my resolve to fight for others facing similar challenges,” Pavani says to Outlook.

Pavani is one of four senior women lawyers practicing out of the Supreme Court who have spoken up to show their support for Justice BV Nagarathna’s dissent against the SC collegium’s recommendation to elevate Justice VM Pancholi to the apex bench. 

The recommendation, adopted on August 25, 2025, by a four-one majority of the collegium led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai, saw Justice Nagarathna as the sole dissenter. In Nagarathna’s dissent, she pointed out that there were judges in line who were more senior to Justice Pancholi, saying it would be unfair to appoint him before the others. 

Although the SC judge's dissent did not explicitly address the issue of gender parity in the higher courts, advocate Indira Jaising posted on X, pointing out that no woman judge had been elevated to the SC in several years. “Since the appointment of Justices Hima Kohli, BV Nagarathna, and Bela Trivedy in 2021, as recommended by then-CJI NV Ramana, 28 judges have been appointed under four CJIs, but not a single woman judge has been recommended,” she posted. 

Jaising also added that: “At least three women judges are senior to Justice Vipul Pancholi. They are Justices Sunita Agarwal, Revati Mohite Dere, and Lisa Gill.”

The fact that the Indian judiciary has historically been male-dominated is supported by data. This is especially pronounced in the higher courts, including the Supreme Court. In the HCs, only 14 per cent of the judges are women, and in the SC, there have been only a handful of women judges since its inception in Independent India in 1950.  

In 1937, Anna Chandy became India’s first female judge, appointed as a munsif in Travancore (later serving as a judge of the Kerala High Court in 1959). India’s first woman justice was M Fathima Beevi in 1989. As of 2025, 11 women have served on the Supreme Court benches, including Beevi, Sujata Manohar, Ruma Pal, Gyan Sudha Misra, Ranjana Desai, B. Nagamuthu Banumathi, Indu Malhotra, Indira Banerjee, Hima Kohli, Bela Trivedi, and B.V. Nagarathna. 

Justice Nagarathna, who was elevated in 2023, is the sole woman member of the Supreme Court collegium, being one of only two women to have ever served in the apex collegium. She is set to be India’s first woman Chief Justice of India in September 2027, but for a brief 36-day term. 

Speaking with Outlook, women judges and senior lawyers say that this number is not an oversight but a calculation. 

Unconscious Bias in Postings?

The women Outlook spoke with said that even when women are elevated to judgeship, or become judges in the trial courts by clearing the exams, they are not given prime postings, but rather delegated to what is seen as “women’s matters.”

Retired District Judge Kamini Lau, who was an ASJ for nearly two decades before leaving the bench to rejoin the bar, spoke bluntly about the systemic gender bias that has long shaped judicial postings.

“Most of the women are deliberately channelled into family courts, and the matrimonial jurisdiction. The entrenched belief among their male colleagues is that women are not capable of handling complex or high-stakes cases, especially those involving financial crimes or terrorism trials.”

Lau, who has been serving the judiciary first as a lawyer and then as a trial court judge, recalls when the first women joined the Delhi district courts. “The first postings given to women were almost exclusively in courts dealing with the Hindu Marriage Act, family, partition suits,” she says, adding that the mindset, as per her experience, was that “The impression was that women were unfit to preside over terrorism prosecutions or other sensitive jurisdictions.” She recalls that it was much later that Mahila courts were established and women were designated to lead them. Lau, however, emphasises that the real centres of judicial power i.e., terrorism cases, economic offences, and other matters with political or financial clout continued to remain in men's hands.

The Leaky Pipeline

In the lower judiciary, women are better represented. Lau believes this is because the lower courts' assignments are done by examination and not by recommendation, like in the higher courts. “There are more women candidates now in the lower judiciary,” she pointed out. 

This could be why, as of February 2025, 7,852 women judges preside over courts in India’s district and subordinate judiciary, which accounts for about a fourth of the total number of trial court judges in India. The India Justice Report 2025 noted that 14 of 18 large states have more than 33 per cent women judges at the trial level. This has been called the “leaky pipeline”, that is, there is a large number of women present at the lower level of the judiciary, but the number dwindles drastically higher up (14 per cent in high courts and minuscule in SC.)

Pavani points out that, across 75 years, only 11 women have ever reached the Apex Court, underscoring how exceptional, rather than routine, female elevation remains. 

“The pipeline isn’t fixing itself either,” she says, pointing to the data on appointments. The India Justice Report 2025 shows that there have been 192 recent High Court appointments. However, only 17.5 per cent of these were women. 

“The persistent under-representation of women in the higher judiciary is therefore not merely a function of time, but of structural barriers and institutional inertia that hinder the advancement of qualified women to the highest echelons of judicial authority,” says Pavani. 

Opaque Criteria in Higher Courts: Flaw or Design?

Unlike in the lower courts, judicial appointments to the High Court and Supreme Court are not subject to a legal quota. The government itself has repeatedly stressed that it cannot put a quota for the higher judiciary. Articles 124, 217, and 224 have no such provision.

The high judges, women and men, who spoke with Outlook appeared to be against the idea of a quota system in the higher courts. Bombay High Court judge Gautam Patel said the only criterion for judgeship can be “competence and ability.”

He explained: “In the armed forces and in the judiciary, you can't have representation. What difference does it make? Is it being suggested that an OBC judge will only handle OBC matters and that an OBC judge can't handle OBC matters?”

Former judge of Patna High Court Anjana Prakash, too, said: “There's a way of bypassing the quota also… there's so much manipulation at this level.” She added that for the higher judiciary, “the first priority should be honesty. Whether your purpose is honest or not. If you're honest in your purpose, then everything is fine.”

Meanwhile, a higher court judge, who spoke to Outlook under condition of anonymity, said that the quota system might be preferable and would “put some pressure on the collegium to acknowledge the women candidates.” Lau, too, says to Outlook: “

The collegium has rarely nominated women for judgeship. Only two of the 11 women judges who have reached the Supreme Court have served on the collegium panel. Furthermore, according to the government’s data, since 2014, the Supreme Court has appointed only six women to the bench. There was a brief period of women’s nominations between 2018 and 2021. Three new women justices were appointed in 2018 and three in 2021. Two of these six women have since retired before they could head the apex court, showing that even when women are recommended, many do not assume the topmost positions.

In September 2025, India’s former CJI N.V. Ramana spoke out at a public event about the fact that there were only 11 women judges in the SC. Ramana warned that without “real change,” there would only be “tokenism.” He then suggested that the then-vacancies should be filled with a diverse group of new judges who would then help reduce case backlogs and “bring the bench closer to society’s makeup.” Between 2020 and 2025, many high courts remain 2/3rd vacant, with the collegium’s recommendations often delayed.

Systemic Barriers and Challenges

While there is a fair number of women judges in the district judiciary nowadays, Lau recalls times when there was not even an infrastructure for them. “Many women were kept at a place, you know, where they had never had an attached toilet. That was a basic human rights violation,” she recalls, noting that the women judges would have to use public toilets, while this was not the case for men judges. 

Then, at their insistence, former Delhi High Court judge Usha Mehra had to step in for the women judicial officers in the trial courts. “We had to take it up with the high court. And we at that time we had Justice Usha Mehra and Justice Rekha Sharma intervene, and they said ‘nothing doing.’”

Ultimately, in the early 2000s, the women judges of the trial court and the high court had to form a committee to get the toilets. "The neglect is not incidental; it was systemic; the signal was unmistakable: before women could be trusted with 'important courts' or positions of leadership, they first had to prove they were entitled to the most basic conditions of work," says Lau.

Another issue that women judicial officers have repeatedly brought up is the delay in the elevation of women judges. They give the example of Justice Geeta Mittal, who had, before 2018, been the Acting Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court. Mittal was appointed Chief Justice of J&K High Court between 2018 and 2020, where she was the first woman Chief Justice of J&K High Court. 

“She was at a time when she should have been taken to the Supreme Court. They made her a Chief Justice, but they did not take her. They sent her to J&K instead,” says a higher judicial officer. 

They also point towards the July 2025 transfers in the Delhi High Court. Prior to July 2025, Justice Pratibha M. Singh was second in seniority in the DHC, making her one of the few women to be appointed to the HC collegium. However, Justice V. Kameswar Rao, then the senior-most judge in the Karnataka High Court, was transferred to DHC. Furthermore, four more judges—Justice Nitin Wasudeo Sambre from the Bombay High Court, Justices Vivek Chaudhary and Om Prakash Shukla from the Allahabad High Court, Justice Anil Kshetarpal from the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and Justice Arun Kumar Monga from the Rajasthan High Court—were moved to the DHC. The transfers altered the hierarchy in DHC such that Justice Singh, who had been third in seniority, dropped to fifth and was removed from the DHC collegium. 

“It's disheartening to note that women judges often receive short tenures. Justice Banumathi's six-year tenure is an exception, while others, like Justice Nagarathna, have a tenure of only 36 days, rendering their time in office symbolic rather than substantive. Such brief tenures prevent them from making significant contributions or appointments, making their elevation seem like a mere gesture to appease the public. In my opinion, the appointment of the first woman as the Chief Justice of India, after 80 years of independence, feels consolatory, rather than appreciative of her commitment,” says Pavani. 

Women judicial officers express fatigue at these numbers. “We, I, feel that, you know, you're hitting the ceiling,” says Lau. 

Lau also left the judicial services under some pressure. She claims she was repeatedly sidelined because the higher court judges were not happy with her stances on some cases. “For years together, my Annual Confidential Reports (ACRs) were not written. ACRs are not written for years, which means my work will not be considered, and I will not be considered for elevation. So, I raised my voice,” she says. 

The collegium process is entirely unwritten and based on closed deliberations between the senior-most judges. A Georgetown report points it out as well, saying the collegium’s “opaque methods of appointments disadvantage women and especially women from marginalised backgrounds”

While the collegium does protect the courts’ privacy, it has disadvantages for women who are often excluded from such “informal networks,” Pavani points out.