A joke that was popular among female barristers at the time, the former justice of the High Court of Australia muses, requires an understanding of life pre-Czech Republic.

“A male barrister goes to heaven, and at the pearly gates, Saint Peter says, ‘To get in, you have to pass a spelling test’. The male barrister says, ‘That's fine.’ ‘Spell God.’ ‘G-O-D.’ ‘You're in.’ Another male barrister goes to heaven, same story. At the pearly gates, Saint Peter says, ‘You have to pass a spelling test.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Spell man.’ ‘M-A-N.’ ‘You’re in.’ A female barrister goes to heaven. Saint Peter says to her at the pearly gates, ‘You must pass a spelling test.’ She says, ‘Okay.’ ‘Spell Czechoslovakia.’”

Speaking last Friday at an International Women’s Day breakfast hosted by the Governance Institute of Australia in Sydney’s CBD, Ms Crennan recalled that, in the 1990s, there was a “very strong feeling of resentment” about the quantum of bias that women were subjected to.

“They felt they weren’t given equal opportunity. A lot of things have been addressed over the years in our professional careers, I’ve no doubt, but there’s probably more to be done. In my day, there was nothing like tax-deductible nannies or anything like that. But, these days, all those sorts of issues I think are addressed much more fairly. And, I think everyone is on the same page about making sure that we all have the benefit of half the human race in terms of their merits, and their talents, and their abilities,” she said.

“A very famous historian in England once said, ‘You understand the present better if you understand the past’. It’s a platitude of course, but I think there’s a lot of wisdom in it,” Ms Crennan observed, as she outlined her time as a woman at the bar.

“I went to the bar in 1979 here in Sydney and in 1980 in Melbourne. And there would have only been about 5 per cent women at the bar. So, we were all very visible and I’m sure we all thought if we made an error of some sort it would whip around amongst our colleagues because of that visibility. Things have changed a lot since those days, it’s over 40 years ago, so going from being 5 per cent to women now representing something much more like 45 per cent of the bar,” she reflected.

“When I went to the bar, there were no women who held the rank of Queen’s counsel and there were no women judges. That meant that I was never the lead. I eventually appeared, only when I myself was Queen’s counsel, before the first woman judge of the High Court, Justice Mary Gaudron. That was a very unusual experience.

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“When I look back, there are the odd biographies around the women who attempted to go to the bar between say, the 1920s and the 1960s. Often discouraged including by their own colleagues. They were driven into narrow specialties, commonly matrimonial law, now called family law. So, they didn’t get an opportunity to work across the range of law. There were only three or four of them really to speak of. And a lot of them left the bar and then just came back 20 years later. And, in a sense, they had a nominal career rather than a career that truly spanned 30 years.

Having such an understanding of the past therefore allows us to better appreciate how far society has come, Ms Crennan surmised.

“There was a gender pay gap after the Second World War, which had reasons one wouldn’t necessarily disapprove of, and it’s a historical hangover, so it does not need to keep being addressed. But everything we worry about and feel anxious about, it’s got a reason why it’s the way it is,” she posited.

“We’ve had massive social change in Australia, for the good, and that means that [those of us on this stage have] all had long careers. In a way, we’ve been on the cusp of things getting so much better, I think. Which is not to say they’re perfect, and they never will be. But, we’ve come a long way.”

Also featured on the panel were Governance Institute CEO Megan Motto, IMB Australia and New Zealand vice-president (global markets) Shelly Lowe and St George Hospital director of trauma Dr Mary Langcake, who offered insights into their own experiences in their respective industries.