Gender & Legal Profession in India: A Critical Sociological Analysis

The Constitution of India not only grants equality to women but also empowers the State to adopt measures of positive discrimination in favour of women for neutralizing the cumulative socio economic, education and political disadvantages faced by them. However, the ground reality of the socio-cultural reality shows heavy gender based inequality in occupations, particularly legal professions. This further jeopardizes any effort at effective empowerment of women. The proposed paper attempts at a critical sociological analysis of the situation. This is would be specifically justified in view of the following statistics for instance:

A total of 20.4% women were employed in the organized sector in 2010 with 17.9% working in the public sector and 24.5% in the private. The labour force participation rate of women across all age‐groups was 20.8 in rural sector and 12.8 in urban sector compared with 54.8 and 55.6 for men in the rural and urban sectors respectively in 2009‐10 (NSS 64th Round). The female share of total Central Government employment stood at 10.0% in 2009. The share of female employees in the scheduled commercial banks was 15.9% in 2009 which rose slightly to 16.6% in 2010.

In 2012, women occupied only 8 out of 74 Ministerial positions in the Central Council of Ministers.

There were 2 women judges out of 26 judges in the Supreme Court and there were only 54 women judges out of 634 judges in different High Courts.