Baroness Helena Kennedy QC President, JUSTICE

1950: Born in Glasgow

1972: Called to the Bar

1988: Presented a programme called Hypotheticals for Granada - Television and co-wrote the award-winning TV drama Blind Justice

1989: Presented the BBC TV documentary Heart of the Matter

1991: Made QC 1997: Made a Labour peer and Bencher in the same year

1998: Appointed Chair of the British Council and Chair of the Human Genetics Commission

2008: Appointed Chair of the Justice’s council

I was from a strong working class family, full of doughty women. My mother was a wonderful woman, who was very much her own person.

I am one of four girls but I was born after the war so was ‘special’. My two older sisters were nine and ten years older than me and were thrilled to have a new baby.

A boy had died before I was born so I was also a replacement son and my father had just come back from the war so I was really his frst babe in arms. It meant I got a lot of loving and that gave me a strong sense of my own value.

My parents measured people by what they did and how they behaved and were never impressed with status or money.

They did want me to stay on at school and, I think, thought that it would be wonderful if I became a teacher. They did not know any women in any other professions.

However, there was no doubt that that they feared for me when I came to London to study law. It was so outside of what they knew. My teachers at school were very encouraging and I think I was generally made to feel special. However, girls were not encouraged to think of doing anything other than teaching or nursing. And being a good Catholic mother was always held out as the highest achievement for a woman.

I feel embarrassed saying it but I liked being top of the class. My mother was the taskmaster. When I went home having got ‘nine out of ten’ she asked where the other one mark went. I think I spent my life wanting her to say, “You are terrifc,” but she was careful with her praise. It kept my feet on the ground. Luckily my father constantly told me I was wonderful.

I never took, “No,” for an answer when it came to the Bar. I felt it had been so hard making that leap into the unknown of studying law in London that I could not admit defeat. That gave me my drive, I think.

I also felt that I had something to offer - I knew about the lives of ordinary people, whereas many of the privileged young men I studied with back in the ‘70s were unaware of what the reality of working class life was like.

I understood how women were excluded from law’s making - it was all made by men with men in mind. I clocked that early on and I wanted change.

The whole business of being myself has been important. I never tried to get rid of my Scottish accent. In a world in which your distinctiveness is going to matter, you hope that you are remembered for your professional skill. But being a woman, being a Scot, being from an usual background for an Upper-Middle class profession... all of those things that make you rare can be very helpful.

I learned how to harness the stuff that I knew, and instead of it weakening me, it became a strength.

I have never tried to do things like the guys. I never, ever call my client by his surname in the way that men in the profession often would, because they went to the sort of schools where you’d be called Smith or Brown... I’m very sensitive to the whole business of people being talked down to or patronised.

There are things about me that are quite adversarial, I enjoy the fght of the courtroom battle. Are those male traits? I don’t know, but I haven’t sought them out. I have all of that as part of who I am.

There has been a fallacy that professionalism at the bar requires distance. But the truth is that it just creates bad lawyering. Too many lawyers don’t understand the lives that their clients lead, or are forced to lead because of disadvantage or poverty.

There’s no doubt that women are better at being empathetic. But its partly because men have it hammered out of them, not because men can’t be empathetic.

I have witnessed the Queen Bee syndrome during my career and it is a rather ugly manifestation of competitiveness between women. Being the rare woman in a man’s world was something they rather relished and it made them hostile to the arrival of new generations of younger women. I’ve always championed opportunities for women to progress in male worlds.

It always disappoints me when I hear women saying, “I don’t want to be the token woman,” as though to be the frst woman through because public demand is insisting on it is a diminution of their talents.

If they are being asked to bring women in, of course organisations are going to choose the best women possible. You’re going to see a better quality of women under those targets than the majority of the men who are in there.

We’ve had positive discrimination forever and a day. The benefciaries of it have just been men.

We have to challenge the idea that merit is a value free zone. When people say, “We’re only going to appoint on the basis of merit”, you have to ask yourself, “Who is deciding what is meritorious?”

In our supreme court at the moment we have one woman, a wonderful woman. We waited ten years, and we still haven’t got a second one. Twenty-six opinions are sought