Sexual Harassment in the Legal Profession with Special Guest Kate Eastman AM SC

Good evening everyone and welcome to tonight's Brennan Justice Talk, focusing on the issue of sexual harassment in the legal profession.

My name is Renata Grossi, I'm one of the co-directors of the Brennan Justice and Leadership Program. Tonight, I'm joined by one of my fellow co-directors from the UTS Law Students' Society, Georgina Hedge, Crystal McLaughlin, our Brennan Administrator, and most importantly, our special guest and presenter for this evening, prominent Senior Counsel of the New South Wales Bar, Kate Eastman.

I'll say a little more about our speaker in a moment, but first I would like to hand over to our First Nations student, Kira Sloane, to do the Acknowledgement of Country.

Hi everyone, my name's Kira and I'm a proud Wiradjuri woman, and I'll just do a quick Acknowledgement of Country. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, whose land I'm Zooming in from today. I would further like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the various traditional lands you are all attending from today. I'd like to pay my respects to the Elders past, present and emerging, and extend that respect to other Indigenous people who are present. If you haven't already, please pop in the chat which traditional lands you're Zooming in from. I'll now pass back to Renata for the rest of the event.

Thank you, Kira. It's really good to be reminded of one of the biggest social justice issues that we face in this country, that we are in fact on stolen land. I would also like to add my very own Acknowledgement of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose ancestral lands this city campus now stands, and also to pay my respects to the Elders, both past and present, and acknowledge them as the traditional custodians of knowledge of this land.

Let me take a moment to just quickly lay out some housekeeping. This Zoom event is being recorded for teaching, learning and event purposes. Only the speakers and those that ask questions in the discussion time will come up in the Zoom recording. You all have the ability to hide and show your camera, as well as to mute and unmute your microphones. When you are not speaking, please put your microphone on mute. We also appreciate that there are many reasons for not having cameras on. We do welcome seeing faces, especially when asking a question, but we completely understand if you do not do so.

Now, in relation to questions and comments, please feel free to post in the chat. We will be monitoring it throughout the talk and will put all the relevant comments and questions to our speaker during the discussion time. Finally, for our Brennan students, in order to claim your five ROJ points, if you could please list your full name now in the chat box as it appears on the UTS systems, and our Brennan team here will award you your points after this event.

Okay, that's all the housekeeping. So let's get to the very important part of the evening, which is for me to introduce to you our very special guest and speaker, Kate Eastman, who is going to be speaking on the issue of sexual harassment in the legal profession.

Kate Eastman is Senior Counsel at the New South Wales Bar. She has 30 years' experience in dispute resolution and advocacy in a wide range of legal areas, including employment, discrimination and human rights law. Kate Eastman has extensive experience in royal commissions and inquiries, preparing submissions and advice for human rights NGOs and community legal centres. She also regularly participates in mediation and conciliation of complex and multi-party disputes.

In addition to her experience in practice, Kate Eastman is also a Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Law at Monash University, where she teaches a range of postgraduate international and Australian human rights law courses. Her commitment to human rights work is evident in her extensive pro bono work, which has included, just to name some of it, representing Yazidi women trafficked into Syria, David Hicks during his time in Guantanamo Bay, asylum seekers, women experiencing sexual violence, sexual harassment and discrimination, children with disabilities seeking access to education, and in war crime investigations.

This work was recognised when Kate Eastman was awarded a New South Wales Law Foundation Award for her services to pro bono work, and in the 2021 Queen's Birthday Honours List when she was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia.

We are indeed honoured to have such a prominent speaker here tonight. So welcome, Kate, and I look forward to your talk on a topic which is very prominent in the news this week, with the Federal Government's National Summit on Women's Safety. So tonight, Kate Eastman will talk to us about sexual harassment in the legal profession. Over to you, Kate.

Well, Renata, thank you very much for that very warm welcome. I'm absolutely delighted to join you. It's a shame we can't do this in person, but it is a great honour to participate. So thank you for the kind words.

I also acknowledge the traditional owners on the lands on which we're all meeting today and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. I also acknowledge our women, the women lawyers who've come before us, who've blazed the trails and who've opened up opportunities for us. So I certainly acknowledge and respect our elder women.

I also acknowledge the members of the faculty who are with us this evening. Thank you very much. And also to all the students participating this afternoon, a warm welcome.

I've got some slides and I'm going to speak to them, so fingers crossed that this will work. Let's see how we go.

The topic I'm going to talk about today is pretty grim. I don't have a lot of good news for you, but I hope that I'll be able to identify where we can make progress. I always find when I talk about this topic that it can have an impact, and I'm very alive to the impact of trauma. So if at any time you feel uncomfortable, I don't mind if you turn me on mute and just take a moment. I've also given you some contact numbers there as we talk through the issues.

I want to start with something quite alarming. On the 22nd of June last year, at around 4:30 in the afternoon, I can honestly say my email box exploded. It was around this time that the High Court made public the fact that it had undertaken an investigation into the conduct of a former judge of the High Court, Mr Dyson Heydon.

The court acknowledged that as a result of the investigation, the complaints concerning six associates of the court in relation to Mr Heydon's conduct towards them had been substantiated.

The Chief Justice issued a press release, and I've given you a little bit of an extract on the screen there. The Chief Justice said, "There is no place for sexual harassment in any workplace. We are ashamed this could have happened at the High Court of Australia. We've made a sincere apology to the six women whose complaints were borne out. We know it would have been difficult for them to come forward." In that statement, the Chief Justice said that the court believes the women.

Mr Heydon has not spoken publicly about these allegations, but shortly after the release from the High Court, through his lawyers, he issued a press release denying the allegations and denying that he had done any wrongdoing.

I think it's fair to say that the news of Dyson Heydon's conduct shook us. It shook us in the sense of how could this happen at the highest levels of the legal profession? And what did this mean for us as a profession?

The reaction was extraordinary, and it's really caused a lot of deep thinking in the legal profession.

Earlier this year, at the opening of the law term, the New South Wales Chief Justice, Chief Justice Bathurst, openly acknowledged that the legal profession has had a significant problem with sexual harassment, but he also acknowledged that the profession had become acutely aware of the problem and the need to endeavour to eliminate it.

So this is what I want to talk about this evening. I want to start by looking at sexual harassment in the legal profession. We're all about rules in the legal profession, so what are the rules?

A good place to start is the definition of sexual harassment, and that's contained in the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act, in Section 28A. There has been an amendment to it last week, but I'll go with the version when I prepared the slides.

Essentially, this is the definition of sexual harassment. It's quite a legal definition, and you can see that there's lots of words in that, and as you know, with any statute, the task is to work out what are the meaning of these words and how does the law apply.

So I think it's always good to boil these legal concepts down to some key factors. These are the elements of sexual harassment: First, you have to identify conduct of a sexual nature. That's an objective test.

The second limb is, is that conduct unwelcome? Not all conduct of a sexual nature will be unwelcome, but where it's unwelcome to the woman, for the most part, who's on the receiving end of it, that will depend on how the particular woman responds. It's not a one-size-fits-all, and it's not a test of the reasonable woman.

But the way in which our law currently operates is it's not enough for the conduct to simply be unwelcome. There's an overlay of a test, and that is, would a reasonable person, looking at all those circumstances, have anticipated that the unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature would offend, intimidate, or humiliate the person concerned?

So this is the reasonableness overlay, and that's got both a mixed subjective and objective test. So it's quite a clunky definition.

In terms of what will be conduct of a sexual nature, that's very broad. It can be at the most serious end, sexual assault or sexual violence, and perhaps at the other end of the spectrum, although there's always degrees in this, it can be inappropriate, sexually loaded comments, jokes, innuendo. It can be things that build up over time, where somebody may be groomed over a period of time. So it's quite an array of conduct that's occurred.

In my practice over 30 years, I've kept a list of the weird and wonderful things, and I had one case in which flicking rubber bands at somebody's legs in a provocative way was an act of sexual harassment. So it's wide and varied.

Now that's the civil test that applies to all of us, including lawyers. But for lawyers, we also have a set of professional conduct rules.

In Australia, depending on whether you're practising as a solicitor or a barrister, there are rules that apply to our professional conduct.

The Legal Profession Uniform Laws—and I've put the solicitors' rules here, but it's the same for the barristers too—state that a solicitor must not engage in the course of practice conduct that constitutes discrimination, sexual harassment or workplace bullying.

That definition of sexual harassment for the solicitors' and barristers' rules is the same definition as the Sex Discrimination Act—so that's unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.

That gives you a little bit of an idea about the rules. Now, what do we actually know about sexual harassment in the legal profession? I want to start with: it's nothing new.

When we look at how the profession has responded to sexual harassment, I think it's probably fair to say that there wasn't much attention to this issue until the mid-1990s.

There was an important report prepared in New South Wales called the Keyes-Young Report, and that looked at gender bias in the legal profession. At that time, and if I just take barristers, 60% of women barristers in New South Wales reported experiencing sexual harassment. It's quite a high number.

Then there was another groundbreaking report in 1998 in relation to Victoria and the Victorian Bar.

Around this time, New South Wales introduced a legal profession regulation called Regulation 69B, and that introduced that professional conduct rule. But it also introduced a mandatory requirement for legal practitioners to have to undergo training in discrimination, harassment, equal opportunity, and work health and safety every three years.

We had hoped by the late 1990s that you'd start to see this change in culture, but sadly that hasn't been the case.

What we see is a series of reports that followed into the new century. Probably one of the more significant reports is in 2014, the Law Council of Australia released its report on the National Attrition and Reengagement Survey (NAS) report—a big study—and that had some very alarming statistics.

Of the women who had responded to the survey for the NAS report, 55% had experienced sexual harassment in their professional life, 80% of women barristers experienced bullying or intimidation, and 84% of barristers had experienced gender discrimination.

The NAS report told us that the bar was probably the worst place for women, while in firms or in-house or in government practice, things were a little bit better.

We did a survey in New South Wales in response to our practising certificate applications, and we found that 12% of those responding had been sexually harassed.

The startling thing about all of this for me was that in 1995, with Keyes-Young, of the women who reported experiencing sexual harassment, no one made a complaint.

When the NAS report was released in 2014, and the survey participants were asked whether they had made a formal complaint, no one had made a formal complaint, but they had raised issues perhaps with their immediate supervisor or with a trusted colleague or friend.

So we have really at this stage a culture of silence in the legal profession where clearly sexual harassment was an issue, but women kept their silence. There was a reluctance to come forward or to make a complaint.

So what's then happened? I think you might recall in October 2017, the Me Too movement really burst onto the scene. That arose out of some revelations involving Harvey Weinstein in the United States, but it started to snowball.

This had an impact in Australia in this sense: the legal profession said, well, it might be us too.

There was some very significant work done by the International Bar Association. That looked at the profession across the world, and I've just got up on the slide there some of the results of the Us Too report by the International Bar Association.

The numbers were still very high in terms of the experience of women being bullied in connection with their work in the law or experiencing sexual harassment.

While this was happening in terms of the International Bar Association, and I will say talking to those involved in that, there was a very significant number of Australians who participated in this survey work.

There was also the reference made by the Australian government to ask our Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, to conduct an investigation into the experience of sexual harassment in Australian workplaces.

That resulted in the Respect@Work report, which was released on the 5th of March last year. You'll see that the findings were that there was about 30% of women who had experienced sexual harassment in the past five years, but significantly, for almost 20%, there had been a negative impact on health. This was across all industries, and you can also see some interesting findings about the cost.

While all this was happening, we said, right, can we as the legal profession look at the Respect@Work report and find out what can we do perhaps in the legal profession?

This was important in terms of the findings from the Respect@Work report: there was low awareness of what type of conduct constituted sexual harassment; there were gaps and incomplete coverage in the Sex Discrimination Act. That was particularly important because for the most part, barristers were not covered by the Sex Discrimination Act because they are not employees and they may be covered when they provide services, but for the way in which barristers or sole practitioners operated, the Sex Discrimination Act didn't apply.

Now, that's changed. It changed last week with the amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act.

You also saw those key findings that people were reluctant to make complaints and the systems for making complaints were difficult. The outcomes, if one makes a complaint of sexual harassment, were not good. The damages aren't particularly high and they're expensive to run cases. Often, non-disclosure agreements or confidentiality agreements are a real feature, and we saw this in terms of the impact in the legal profession.

Since Me Too, what's happened? We were doing a lot of work in the legal profession among women lawyers following the Respect@Work report. Women lawyers have been very involved and have made some fantastic contributions to the work of Respect@Work. There were lots of submissions made by the Lawyers' Association, by women lawyers personally, and various legal bodies.

But it really took the 22nd of June to almost shake the legal profession into action. The Law Council of Australia immediately responded, and we held a big roundtable. We pulled everybody together and we said we need a national action plan.

We need to make sure that the law is clear, that there's comprehensive coverage across the legal profession and there's a consistency of approach. We talked about the need to support women who are victims and survivors of sexual violence at work, and we needed to find pathways that if women wish to make a complaint, they would not be the ones with the burden, but the institution should take responsibility.

Around this time, it was almost like there was a wake-up in the courts. There was an important case in the full court of the Federal Court involving a solicitor in Northern New South Wales, and his persistent attempts—and his lawyer said he just wanted to be like Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice—was just not on in the profession.

Over the course of the last year, there's been a lot of work done within the legal profession, and we've seen other cases. There was a prosecution for professional misconduct of one of the members of the New South Wales Bar who'd been involved in a fairly lewd act at a social function. The Bar Council of New South Wales had referred that matter to the tribunal, and the tribunal made a finding that his conduct was unsatisfactory professional conduct.

There was also the release of two significant reports: one in Victoria, which looked at the experience of sexual harassment in Victorian courts and tribunals, and a big review of the South Australian legal profession.

This has really culminated also in bringing the Respect@Work recommendations together. The government announced a national roadmap to respond to Respect@Work, and that has resulted in some amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act that were introduced in June but passed last September.

We've also seen that there continues to be poor behaviour of members of the judiciary, and there was an announcement in July this year about the conduct of one of the Federal Circuit Court judges who has retired now.

So it's a grim picture. I suppose I want to leave you with these questions: is change possible, and why is there something about the legal profession?

The factors that really underpin why sexual harassment might occur in the legal profession are the following: we are a very hierarchical, patriarchal, male-dominated culture in the legal profession. This is surprising because for the last over 30 years, almost 60% of law graduates have been women. But notwithstanding this large number of women studying law and many entering the profession, it's still a very heavily male-dominated profession.

For example, in the New South Wales Bar, there's about two and a half thousand barristers. Almost one third of the entire bar are men over the age of 60. Almost half of the whole bar are men over the age of 50. There's about 50 women Senior Counsel, and we comprise maybe about 3% of the entire bar.

When we look at the profession, it continues to be male-dominated. We have entrenched gender bias in the way in which the profession is structured and works. It's a very competitive and adversarial setting. There is a lack of cultural diversity, and there is a culture of silence.

That culture of silence protects men, and it also contributes to fear among women—fear that they will be shamed, fear that they will lose their careers, and fear that they will be blamed for allowing this conduct to occur.

These issues are particularly troubling, but I think that the profession is finally facing the issues and will do something about it.

So is change possible? I think the answer is yes.

The Honourable Justice Kenneth Hayne, who served on the High Court at the same time as Dyson Heydon, has been extremely outspoken on these issues, and his view is this shouldn't be a complex matter—that men should understand when their behaviour is inappropriate. And he says simply, just stop doing it. How hard can it be, he says, just stop.

But I do think sometimes in changing cultures and understanding hierarchical environments that really are founded on patriarchal systems, it takes sometimes a little bit more than simply stopping.

We need to think about how many women there are in the profession, but importantly, to think about where women are in the profession. It's not just enough to have more than 50% of solicitors now being women, but we need women in senior leadership roles, and we need women to be visible in those leadership roles.

We need to talk about cultural change, and as women, we need to talk about what type of profession we want to work in and how we would like our profession to serve us and for us to serve our profession.

We need to address shame. One of the most startling experiences I had in listening to the stories of women who came forward and talked about what happened to them following the revelations of Dyson Heydon was a colleague of mine who I worked with when I first started as a lawyer about 30 years ago. She was a few years ahead of me and she had experienced sexual harassment. I never knew about that at the time; she hadn't told people at the time. But 30 years later, it still stuck with her. She still felt shame, but now she was angry.

She looked at her professional life and she asked herself this question: what type of woman could I have been if I was not sexually harassed? And what type of lawyer could I have been? What choices might I have made in my life had I not experienced sexual harassment?

So that reflection about the impact of sexual harassment—yes, it's acute when it occurs, but the shame and the stigma can stay with women. That's not acceptable, I don't think, in modern work life, and nor is it acceptable that somebody carries that shame and distress with them.

I think we need to change the culture by not imposing the obligations on women who experience sexual harassment to also have the burden of doing something about it or fixing it. We need to shift to institutional responsibilities, which is what the Chief Justice has talked about.

We need to think about our role as bystanders and awareness—how far do we tolerate everyday sexism? How far do we participate in it, because we've got to get on with everybody and feel that we, too, want to belong. The legal profession is one of wanting to belong.

But belonging should not come at the price of treating women unequally or allowing sexual harassment to occur.

You can probably gather I'm very strong about these issues, and the topics I've talked about are quite strong. So I'm giving you the reminder of the Respect@Work report, but the 1800RESPECT number.

From here on, I'd love to have a discussion with you and we can open up for questions and discussion. So, Georgina, over to you.

Yeah, thank you so much, Kate. That was just absolutely such an insightful presentation, and I'm sure will only become more insightful through the questions.

I would encourage everyone, if you would like to, please use the raise hand function if you would like to ask a live question—we'd love to hear your voices—but also understand that if you would prefer to just use the chat, feel free to pop your questions in there.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask them in the Q&A section. If anyone has any questions, we'd love to kick off.

I think that—oh, we've got a raised hand. Maxine, would you like to kick us off with the first question?

Thank you so much, Georgina, and thank you so much, Kate. That was just so comprehensive and thought-provoking.

As you know, Kate, I work in the Faculty of Law and have taught for several years and was also in practice. I frame this question not by way of an excuse for conduct and behaviour that is unlawful, but in terms of the law itself, the practice of law, the laws that are based on very much winner-loser—the competitive, adversarial nature of law.

Do you think that has any impact on behaviour in the profession? I think also in the sporting world, where we know harassment is rife and treatment of women is a major challenge and inquiries that have been in sport as well, that that also has that kind of competitiveness about it—that there's got to be a winner in every case. Do you think that has any impact on how the profession conducts itself? Thanks, Kate.

Thanks, Maxine. That's an excellent question. I think the answer to that is yes, because that adversarial setting is very much about winning or losing, and that very much is a patriarchal structure in terms of dispute resolution.

It's a very different way of thinking when you've got one winner and one loser and you're not really looking at a solution that suits both. Whereas women, for the most part—I'm generalising—look at more systems-based thinking in terms of the way in which they might solve problems, and not just, in a sense, convert the old-fashioned form of duelling into verbal duelling in a court.

But I think at another level it's this: when you work in an adversarial setting and you've got the responsibility of representing your client and the client's paying you to advocate for them and to win the case, there's a lot of showmanship—and I use that word deliberately—in terms of the theatre of law, whether it be in a meeting or whether it be in court.

So you have to be confident. We learn our confidence based on looking at how other people conduct themselves, and our models for that really come from men rather than from women.

So I talk very much to the junior readers and new barristers about the importance of vulnerability and the courage in vulnerability. I'm very taken with Brené Brown's work on this—that courage comes from vulnerability.

It's very hard to be confident all the time when you're in an adversarial setting because you're constantly surrounded by critics—they're the judges, they're the clients, they're your opponents, they're your bosses.

I think we get into this culture of confidence to mask our vulnerability, and we forget that there's courage in expressing vulnerability or uncertainty. That doesn't sit very easily for lawyers.

So our natural inclination is not to be vulnerable, but to armour ourselves up over and over again. I think that really contributes to behaviours in terms of how lawyers interact, which almost make any opportunity to get an advantage over somebody else, or to show that you're stronger than someone else, that sexual harassment can be a result—because sex and power over women are a way of showing dominance and force.

So it's a bit of a long-winded way of answering the question, but I agree with you. I see it at a number of different levels.

Thanks so much, Kate.

Yeah, thank you, Kate. That was an amazing answer.

We have a question from the chat from Mac. His question is: do you think that adding a clause within the Legal Profession Uniform Laws would help to create cultural change within the legal profession and ensure that there are greater consequences for sexual harassment within the profession? He provides an example: suspension or removal from the bar.

With that rule for both solicitors and barristers, if there's an allegation that somebody's breached that law or that rule or acted inconsistently, then a person can make a complaint to the Legal Services Commissioner, and that complaint will then be investigated.

If the complaint is sufficiently serious to warrant it being referred to the tribunal for disciplinary action and the tribunal makes a finding of professional misconduct, then the legal practitioner can be struck off.

If the tribunal makes a finding that it's unsatisfactory professional conduct—so slightly less serious than professional misconduct—then the legal practitioner can be reprimanded, given cautions, be required to pay a fine in some cases, to undergo education or training, to be assigned a mentor, to issue an apology. So there's a range of remedies that are available.

But those remedies really are a remedy for the profession to sanction the legal practitioner. There's very limited remedies for victims of sexual harassment through that process.

The idea of having professional conduct rules is that one of the functions is to create deterrence and to say to other legal practitioners, if you behave like this, then you too may be subject to sanction and lose your opportunity to practise as a legal practitioner. So deterrence is important.

But probably deterrence is not of itself enough to achieve cultural change.

So I think it would be very difficult to put in professional conduct rules a requirement to change your cultures. That's really got to come from the profession itself and the profession, rather than just the individuals, in terms of changing culture.

So it's a good suggestion, but I think it needs something more.

We used to have the compulsory every three years training, and I've done a lot of those training courses for lawyers over the time. I've had reactions from male lawyers sitting in the front row saying, for example, "I'd love to be sexually harassed," or immediately picking up the newspaper and starting to read the newspaper when I started to speak about the issues.

So I think there's an element to how far can you force people to be responsive to it, and you have to be very creative in how you work on cultural change, rather than just imposing rules on people. But it's a great question.

Yeah, I agree. I think that's so interesting.

We've got a live question from Eliza. Thanks, Eliza.

Hi, Kate. Thanks for the talk. Maybe looking to that cultural shift again, do you think it's something that can be brought about by new lawyers entering the workforce, or do we need to have that top-down approach for it to solidify?

Great question, Eliza. Thank you. It's probably a mixture of things. You definitely need top-down, so the statements from the Chief Justice of the High Court and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and other courts is really important. But I think it also comes from new lawyers coming in.

That reminds me, a few years ago—probably about four years ago—I was on a panel, actually at the UTS old law school, so maybe that might be more than four years ago. It was an intervarsity session for women law students, and we were talking about sexual harassment.

On the panel, we said to each other, do you think we should tell them the real news, what it's really like? So I decided, okay, I'm just going to start by asking a question. Probably about 60 people in the room.

My question was, before we start this panel, I want to ask you this: how many of you feel that in the first five years of legal practice you might experience sexual harassment? Much to my surprise and perhaps sadness, maybe about 50% of people in the room put their hands up, but not the three men who were there.

they were okay and then i asked the question in the first five years of legal practice how many of you think you will know someone who experiences sexual harassment and pretty much 90 of the whole room put their hands up now the difference is when i was a law student in the 1980s if you if someone had asked me that question i would not have put my hand up for either of those because i it was unimaginable for me as a law student that when i finished my law degree and i worked really hard and i was going to go into work it just was not even in my thinking that i would experience sexual harassment or i don't even know anybody who would do that and i was sort of disappointed on one level that this was the response of prospective women lawyers but at the same time i'm sort of pleased because you're going into it knowing this could happen to you and i hope that will give you more tools to call it out to do something about it and not be fearful that because you are the recipient of misconduct therefore the shame has to stay with you or you can't do anything about it so i really think there's a great opportunity for people coming to the profession to really stab their foot down about what's acceptable and what's not but we still need those you know the senior leaders to be able to speak out and not condone that type of behaviour so it's a really good question thanks eliza thanks kate and eliza um and i think the next question from madeline really leads really nicely from that and her question is that although every profession would benefit from increased education regarding sexual harassment in the workplace she asks whether you think there is a place um for additional training starting from the university level particularly in law schools to institute a more long-term structural cultural change yeah i think i think that's a great question actually because um training and awareness is really important and it's not that you do it once but it's got to be ongoing and it has and then the the outcome of training has to be reinforced we've looked a lot over the last few years about what type of training actually works and just sort of giving a lecture about what the law says is not good enough and so often the best training in this area comes from people having to be put in the shoes of somebody else to uh have an appreciation of what it feels like or what you would do in those circumstances and i think you in the context of law students and university life we know that sexual harassment occurs on campus and kate jenkins has also done a very detailed report there but i think being prepared for professional life whereas at law school for the most part all of your colleagues are this around about the same age but once you move into the bar or law firm perhaps less so in in-house or in community legal sectors or government but in the sort of more old-fashioned area of law people that you work with will be the same age as your grandparents or your parents and i think knowing how to deal with relationships with much older and more powerful people and being able to know what are appropriate boundaries is probably a good thing because at law school you're looking at a much flatter structure but really go into the hierarchy when you start to get into professional practice so i think that's a good idea in terms of saying how do you prepare for professional practice and professional life and what might be the issues that you have to confront both from an ethical and personal basis yeah great thank you kate so everyone we've got about 10 minutes left of discussion so if anyone has any more questions please pop them in the chat but our next question is from monica and she asks whether you think that quotas within the legal profession may have a positive or negative impact on the profession in terms of changing the culture that we've been discussing tonight uh the answer is yes i do uh and i think a lot of us have been a bit sort of nervous about putting quotas in but there's quotas in this quotas and i think part of it is being really targeted on the way in which quotas might work so i'll give you an example where i think it's worked very well is again and you know i'm focusing a lot on the bar but that's where the sort of you know some of the hard stuff happens is uh we have at the present time about 23 percent of all barristers are women and we've found over time that of the 23 of women barristers they do not get 23 of the work and they certainly do not get 23 of the value of the labor work coming to the bar so the law council of australia has had in place what's called an equitable briefing policy and what that essentially does is uh for law firms or governments or individuals or corporations who believe in diversity they can sign up to the inevitable briefing policy and that means that when decisions are made about briefing barristers that they consider up women our barristers and that they work to ensure that 20 of all of the priests go to senior embarrassers so that's women over 10 years practice and 30 go to junior women barristers and so we've deliberately made them stretch targets we'll call them quotas and that the value of the briefs also have to be comparable so don't just save all your prolono briefs up for women but make sure that women will also be paid for the work that they do and this policy has been in place for three years now and we've really seen a change because everybody has to report to the policy so we're up to uh 30 percent of briefing for junior barristers we're not quite there for the senior barristers but that's changed the culture in this sense that it's forced firms to think about women barristers and not just say we'd love to breathe a woman embarrassed well we just don't know where she is or we don't know if there's anyone good enough but it's really sort of forced uh briefing entities to look at the talent and what it's actually done is increase the overall talent and the experience for barristers because it now means it's a real focus on who's best for the job rather now he's just the old maid of a friend of a friend and he's my friend it's really brought excellence i think in terms of briefing practices across the board so targeted targets and quotas i think can work quite well and i would like to see there to be perhaps some targets in terms of judicial appointments both not only for women but also from people from culturally diverse backgrounds and people with disability is really shake up work where we have diversity in judiciary great thank you kate and um so our next question is from georgie and she asks uh whether you think that perhaps leveling out those hierarchical structures in private practices and other traditional legal formats to an extent would be a worthwhile step to take in order to address these inappropriate power dynamics within the industry yeah that's a good ques that's a really good question and you know my easy answer to it is yes but when i think about it it's it's tricky because law is one of these professions where you just don't learn at once and you know everything law is continuous learning and continuous education and it's not only keeping up to date with new law but there's a lot that goes into learning the practice of law to understand the rules procedures to get the experience in terms of negotiation experience working with clients and that really comes over time and so a lot of the structures really reflect uh the long learning and the lifetime learning and development of legal skills so it's you know it's tricky to sort of say you'd immediately flatten it but what you can do is look at the way in which work is organized in law firms or at the bar to try to give people a fairer go and to look at ways of creating equality and so that's quite a complex process because you have to look very carefully at what the particular environment is so for example coming back to the bar the chief justice of the federal court encourages senior barristers like me if i'm in court and i've got a junior barrister with me to allow that junior barrister to have a speaking role at court in court and that then increases opportunities there so in that way that helps to flatten out the hierarchy but we really sort of have to pick the particular area as to how we might do that yeah great thank you kay um i'm not sure if anyone has any more questions in the chat but while we wait if anyone has any other questions i have a question that i could ask oh jokes tian has asked a question so we can use her question instead of mine we'll save mine for later if we need it um so sato so tian asks um that she's read a lot of your work firstly and it feels very privileged to be listening to your insight so that's really lovely so she asks how can we assure ensure more women reach leadership positions because where this occurs women's issues are being are better reflected in those workplace particularly as so many things still weigh unequally against women such as primary care taking maternity leave etc essentially stopping women from climbing up the ladder and then not to mention the sexual harassment issues that we've been talking about today that have that forced women out of the legal profession so a couple of things you've got to be brave and strong the law is a wonderful career and a wonderful profession for women to go into and there's lots of opportunities there but you have to be brave and you have to be persistent and uh you have to be prepared to overcome hurdles but my big message to all of you is that when we talk about the issues or the problems for women in the profession i do not want women lose to be seen as downtrodden you know hapless ladies who need help we're very strong in our profession there's a lot of very strong women in the legal profession and i don't want you to just think everything is about overcoming hurdles there's wonderful opportunities for women in the profession and part of it is being very strategic in how you plan your career so first of all yes you can be very concerned about are women disadvantaged because they may still have the primary caring role and what does this mean well let me put this in perspective for you for you uh who young women who will be starting your legal careers in the near future you are going to be working for 45 years so it does not matter whether you have a year off here or there and so women can take perspective in a way perhaps that some of our male colleagues see rising in ambition as a bit of a race you don't have to do everything in the first five years and the skills that women acquire in understanding systems and organization managing families and relationships are the very skills that make you a good lawyer to be able to understand the experience of clients both commercial personal in their lives their disputes really important so as women um developing their own lives those skills can be very important to being a lawyer so being a lawyer is not a race you're not going to be the chief justice in the first 10 years you may not only be the chief justice in the 20 years but you're able to take your time so for women i think it's about setting your own race in your own speed and see that going in and out of the law at different points in time can be a real benefit and so i would like you to sort of think about it as a very sort of positive way forward rather than what do i have to achieve as quickly as possible you know and if you've got to be working for 45 years you need to be able to continually learn continually challenge continually enjoy not just be worn down by it and so really think about being flexible in how you want to be a lawyer and what you might do in the law amazing thanks kate so if anyone has any extra questions they would like to they please pop them in the chat we're about to we've probably got enough time for another one more question if anyone has one otherwise i can ask mine um so maybe i'll ask my question if no one has any other ones so i was going to ask you kate um obviously this year i feel like we've seen a lot of um issues to do with sexual harassment and sexual assault emerging from parliament in particular in light of britney higgins and particularly that christian porter claim which obviously has quite a big link to the legal industry i was wondering what you thought about how much policy considerations and the way that the government approaches sexual harassment and sexual assault impacts professions in general but particularly the legal industry and whether that has any effect and the way the government approaches these issues has any effect on how certain professions might respond in their proactive approach to the issue um that's a really tricky question thanks for that one i think that i think the answer is how governments respond on all issues are really critical in setting the tone for the community and setting expectations for the community and particularly our politicians and lawmakers or our senior members of the judiciary or in the legal profession we look to them as role models so when we sort of see our leaders falling short or seeming to be insensitive on issues around gender or the way in which women are treated that has a flow-on effect in terms of the type of behavior that the rest of the community think is acceptable or not acceptable and i i really sort of get this sense that um and this is the 730 lee sales did a series on this last week women are really angry and the anger is when you're not listened to and you're not treated with respect that makes you angry in the past women just probably suck that up and just said we've just got to get on with it but i think now because there are women politicians and women senior judges and senior women in the legal profession is that you've got a combination of the women who are prepared to step up and say this is not right really countering back against some of the behaviour and the everyday sexism and really looking at bringing back a values-based approach to the way in which we want our society to be and the respect that we wish to have for each other so i do think there is that tension there that sometimes the politicians can show us the worst of behaviour and we see that and say we don't want to be like that but we also need to look at when politicians and particularly our women politicians are really really trying very hard to affect change and know that they are often up against it as well and i think shining the light on what's happened in parliament house has really given a sense that it's a pretty hard environment for women to be in but if we did not have those women there it would be much worse so we need to support those women while they're in the parliament to be able to make the change and i think the same in the judiciary and the same in the senior branches of the legal profession um and this is um this is an ongoing thing i mean some of you might have watched this week we've had the national summit on women's safety and violence and it's been a very sort of interesting exercise and a lot of criticism amongst the politicians are it's not going far enough and we're not doing that i think it's fair enough to be critical but it's also important to support the politicians that are trying to affect change and um and to know that they do represent us and that we should have trust and confidence in them as well that's a hard thing to say because you know some politicians like them but i think we really have to think about uh supporting those women who can change the law and make a real difference for us thank you so much for answering that kate and thank you to everyone who contributed your questions to the discussion that wraps up our discussion portion of tonight so um to kind of conclude the event on behalf of the uts faculty of law the uts law student society and all the students here tonight i would like to thank you kate for coming here tonight to share your knowledge and comments with us um in light of much of the current discussion surrounding sexual harassment consent education and the way workplaces can address this issue it has been so fantastic to hear your insights tonight as future lawyers i'm sure i can speak for all the attendees here that your presentation tonight has educated us all on the areas where change has but and also still needs to occur as well as instilling in all of us present here tonight a desire to contribute to meaningful change as we enter the profession thank you for all you have done in spearheading these changes as well as taking your time to share your knowledge with us tonight thank you again thank you also to crystal mac renata elise erica and the entire brennan and social justice team for helping to administrate the event tonight thank you to as well to our dean leslie hitchens and the other members of the faculty of law for joining us here tonight a reminder to all participants that they will receive five roj for attending this evening's event we also encourage all of you here today to engage with this topic through further reading which you can reflect upon for roj points by submitting 350 words to career hub um i'd also like to remind you all to keep your eyes peeled for our final justice talk for the year which will be held on the 6th of october and will cover pursuing a career in social justice so thank you again to kate and to everyone for attending today and i will quickly pass back to renata to make some final comments thank you georgina for such great sharing i would also like to add my very sincere thanks to kate eastman we really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk to us about this very important topic it's really um a wonderful thing to be able to get a view from the inside of the profession in listening to your talk tonight i'm very much thinking about the structures of the legal profession that you have highlighted as significant to the problem and thinking about how much they're really reflected in other institutions including the university i'm also struck by the fact as you stated that one of the key findings of the respected work study was that there is a low awareness of what constitutes sexual harassment this would also point to the need for our lawyers our future lawyers to have a broader education i think these are the very things that we're addressing here at uts and via this very program now i'm sure that everybody is thinking about different aspects of what you have spoken about tonight but that's a reflection of how rich your presentation has been so my thanks i also would like to thank a few other people uh thanks to the co-directors georgina and mack um and also our tireless administrator crystal mclaughlin without whom these events will truly not be possible um a really big thanks to all the members of the faculty who are here tonight for their support of both the program and the topic and finally thanks to everybody in the audience for your active involvement in this very important discussion and crystal if you could just put up that final slide um i just want to say that if anything we have discussed here tonight has raised any issues for you on this slide you will see reference to a number of resources that may be of help there both inside and outside of uts so good night everyone stay safe and we look forward to seeing you at our very next event.