Women in law: We’ve come a long way, baby – Deborah Chambers, KC

Detailed summary

Five of the 12 new King’s Counsel are women, a once-unthinkable shift.

Five of the 12 new King's Counsel appointed in October 2026 are women. L-R: Annabel Maxwell-Scott, Polly Pope, Janette Campbell, Karen Radich, Kirsten Gray. Image / NZME

The legal profession has changed enormously. The work is not finished.

On October 16, 2026, Chris Bishop, the Attorney-General, announced 12 new King’s Counsel. The commentary praised the breadth of their expertise, and the Māori Law Society, Te Hunga Rōia Māori o Aotearoa, celebrated the two Māori appointees.

When I started practice in 1983, there were no women silks at all. A woman taking silk then would have been the first, and it would be five more years before Sian Elias and Lowell Goddard became exactly that. Now five women in a round of 12 has become normal, with no one raising an eyebrow.

To see how far we have come, read Dame Silvia Cartwright’s remarkably frank, recently published memoir, That Woman.

Cartwright was one of only two women in her Otago law class in the 1960s. She would go on to become the first woman judge of the High Court, in 1993, despite the overt sexism she faced. She won her first law clerk’s job over 10 other applicants, on lower pay than the men, and was told she got it because she had the best legs. The court robing room was for men only, so women changed in the toilet. One judge told her to lengthen her skirt. Another marked women divorce litigants out of 10. When I arrived 20 years later, the Auckland High Court still had no usable robing room for women, and I changed in the toilet too.

I won’t pretend my start was the same as Dame Silvia Cartwright’s. But the assumptions hadn’t gone away. I joined my first firm in 1983, and was soon told it had an (unwritten, of course) policy of no women partners. I moved to another firm, which had no women partners either, and then to a third, which had one recently appointed woman partner: unmarried, childless and devoted to the job. That was what the profession then asked of a woman who wanted to make partner.

That background meant…

Opening of the article, excerpted from NZ Herald Business. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.