The Indian higher judiciary has a gender gap problem.
In 75 years, only four per cent of the SC’s judges and only 14 per cent of the high court judges have been women.
This gap came into focus when India’s only sitting female SC judge, and the only woman in the collegium, BV Nagarathana, dissented on an appointment of a male judge to the SC last week.
The Supreme Court of India is 75-years-old. Since its inception in 1950, the top court has had 268 judges. But only 11 women judges have sat on the apex bench— four per cent of the total number. This tiny number is more than a coincidence, it’s a pattern that follows into the country’s high courts where only 14 per cent of all sitting judges have been women.
These numbers have long been a point of contention for women on the bar and bench, however they have been recently highlighted after Justice BV Nagarathna's sole dissent to the appointment of Justice Pancholi came out. Four women senior lawyers including Indira Jaising and Shobha Gupta of the SCBA have put out statements in support that question why Justice Pancholi was elevated to the apex bench when there are four women judges higher than him in seniority.
Women Of The Bench: A Tiny Percentage
India’s first woman SC judge was M Fathima Beevi in 1989. From 1950 till Justice Beevi’s appointment, the apex court had an all-male bench. Since 1989, there have been 11 eleven women appointed to the SC. India is set to get its first women Chief Justice in 2027 when Justice BV Nagarathna ascends to the position, but it will only be for a month before her statutory retirement.
Since July 2025, the SC has only one women judge. There were briefly, and for the first time in Indian history, two women judges on the top bench with Justice BV Nagarathna and Justice Bela M Trivedi. Justice Trivedi stepped down in May 2025 after several years on the bench. Since then, only Justice Nagarathna remains.
The numbers in the High Courts of India do not fare much better. There are 754 judges on the HC benches but only 106 of them are women— just 14 per cent. This is a slight improvement of .2 per cent from the October 2024 when there were only 99 women judges in the HCs where the total sitting judges were 719. This is an increase from 11 per cent in 2021.
Stark Gender Gap In Courts
Within the courts as well, the gender gap is stark. India’s largest high court, Allahabad High Court, has only a two per cent women judges, while eight major high courts in India— Himachal Pradesh, Odisha, Manipur, Madhya Pradesh, Patna and Sikkim, have only one women judge. Uttarakhand, Meghalaya and Tripura have none at all. The Centre for Law & Policy Research (CLPR) reported less than five per cent of High Court Chief Justices have been women—only 12 out of 242.
Some states have better representation, but nowhere near equal. Telangana, Gujarat, and Sikkim edge higher, with 29.6 per cent, 27.5 per cent and 33 per cent women judges, respectively.
While the lower judiciary fares a bit better with the percentage numbers, the India Justice Report 2025 showed that only 37.4 per cent of all lower judicial officers are women.
According to SC lawyer Shobha Gupta, the lack of women judges in higher judiciary is a "Deliberate and conscious call at the level of decision making, else this exclusion could not have happened for so long and so consistently." She says that "The Collegium consistently missed out this opportunity when it comes to ensure adequate representation of women in higher judiciary specially in Supreme Court. As a country it should shock our collective wisdom and collective conscious when we see only one judge out of 34 full strength in SC, elevation of no woman judge to SC in last 4 years since August 2021 while 28 judges have been elevated to SC since then and only 11 women judges in SC in the glorious history of 75 years of Indian judiciary."
