Here is my Article as Published in the Lawyers’ Daily on June 7 2019 on this issue.
The case for consultation on gender-neutral robing rooms | Anita Szigeti
Friday, June 07, 2019 @ 8:17 AM | By Anita Szigeti
I have been a member of the Ontario bar since 1992. In those years I have argued hundreds of cases in the Court of Appeal and in our superior courts. On a monthly, if not weekly basis, I have taken respite from being exposed to the dominant male culture of the legal profession, in the “Lady Barristers’” Room at Osgoode.
Its name did not cause me pain. It felt quaint because it was from another era. It made me happy to enter a room for women only. We had a safe space of our own, the women lawyers who were readying ourselves for a difficult and challenging day in our province’s top courts, without having men around. Even if it was for the few minutes we had to change into our gowns. For many women in the legal profession, this alone is a huge benefit. Plus, junior counsel had access to senior women mentors, organically, in that space.
All of this would be lost if the sole option were gender-neutral change rooms.
Imagine my surprise then when one day I read the announcement by my governing body that it will now “create one dedicated gender-neutral space for all barristers to robe and network.” Where did this plan suddenly come from? It appears to have been an operational decision made without consultation in response to 877 people signing a petition that complained about the inequity of 12 lockers in the women’s robing area vs. 75 in the men’s.
Those are indeed uneven numbers. At first blush they seem unfair. But there is a lot more to the story than that. One has to take into account who the lawyers are who actually use those robing rooms and when they are using them, as well as for what purpose. There should be enough lockers in each space to accommodate the lawyers who appear in the courtrooms. That means probably 15 in the women’s and 25 in the men’s. That’s my experience but studies would need to be done to know for sure. If equal numbers must be the desired goal, then let’s say 20-20, anticipating some growth by women practitioners in those courts.
There are not 75 lawyers appearing in the whole of the courthouse on any given day, so there are too many lockers in the men’s robing room and the space has always been wasted in that regard. Why not use the extra space to create a third, gender-neutral change room for those who may want that? Wouldn’t that have been the sensible and simple solution to the next problem identified, as a “clarification” to the original complaint: the fact that non-binary lawyers need a safe space to change into their robes. Of course they do. One should be created. But that does not mean that the rest of the 50,000 members of the Ontario bar must only ever have access to one gender-neutral space to network and robe.
Having only one gender-neutral space would leave a lot of other people in our profession out in the cold, or in the various toilets in hallowed recesses of the old building, or some other “stall.” The people who now have an open space within which they can comfortably change into and out of their court gowns because there are gendered spaces include orthodox observant members of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, among others, who should not now be relegated into toilets. And what about lawyers whose variously abled bodies cannot be cramped into stalls or who may require an assistant in their robing routine or use mobility devices, to name just a few among a host of many other factors nobody has stopped to consider, because nobody has stopped to consider anything.
Had anybody actually asked anyone who is a habitual or frequent user of the spaces within Osgoode and who appears in those courtrooms on the daily, they might have learned that the “networking” opportunities across gender lines also happen organically every day in the loveliest of open lounge spaces imaginable — the restaurant upstairs, which offers coffee and muffins before court. There, teams of lawyers of any and all genders including our non-binary colleagues can discuss our cases without breaching confidentiality as one necessarily would do if discussing such matters in a robing room where we may be overheard.
It is difficult to know why the Law Society of Ontario reacted in such a knee-jerk over-the-top fashion to a simple problem of too few lockers in the women’s robing area. Why refuse to consult and instead invite legal action by groups whose human rights may well be engaged by the proposal to create one big gender-neutral space? In the name of inclusion, terrible injustices to vulnerable members of our profession may be the result. Why not protect against even that possibility and invite input from us all? A responsible law society would take the time that is necessary to make an informed decision.
Anita Szigeti is a senior woman lawyer in Toronto who advocates for seriously mentally ill clients. She has represented 10,000 individuals at every level of court. She spends a lot of her time “robing.”
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