By Johnathan Paoli
Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi has challenged South Africa’s legal fraternity to move beyond celebrating women’s representation and take concrete steps to ensure women occupy positions of power across the sector.
Speaking at the Black Lawyers Association (BLA) High Tea in Sandton on Saturday, Kubayi said Women’s Month should be a catalyst for meaningful transformation, particularly as South Africa marks 70 years since the historic 1956 Women’s March.
“My message as we mark 70 years since 1956 is that this year it can’t be normal. So the reflection can’t be just speeches, but the reflection must go deep. How do we transform from here? We had a generation that was faced with apartheid. What our challenge is today is about transformation within the legal fraternity. Opportunities for women, but meaningful opportunities so that they can stand,” Kubayi said.
The minister said transformation could not be measured simply by the number of women entering the legal profession, but had to be reflected in who owned and led influential firms and participated in major commercial transactions.
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“We do have giants in the sector. And I was saying to them, we can’t continue to have previously advantaged companies that are the big giants in the sector. We should now, as we reflect, have women leading companies that actually do trans-international transactions, not only in South Africa,” she said.
The event was held under the theme “From Representation to Leadership: Transforming the Justice Sector and Advancing Women’s Constitutional Right”, attended by members of the judiciary, legal practitioners, advocates, academics, corporate counsel, government representatives and candidate legal practitioners.
She said women already occupying senior positions had a responsibility to ensure they did not become the final beneficiaries of transformation, but instead created opportunities for the next generation.
“I call for all of us to take responsibility and mentoring, all of us to ensure that we make a room comfortable for the younger generation so that it doesn’t become me alone as a comfortable leader, as a woman sitting around the table and I’m comfortable to be the old one,” Kubayi said.
“I must be able to bring other women around the table. I must be able to mentor. I must be able to support. But where there are injustices, I must be able to stand up and speak for those women as well,” she added.
The minister’s comments come against a backdrop of persistent disparities in the legal profession, particularly when gender and race are considered together.
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According to figures from the Law Society of South Africa, there are currently 35,541 practising attorneys, of whom 16,369 are women, accounting for about 46.1% of practising attorneys.
However, the representation of Black women is considerably lower.
Of the total number of practising attorneys, 5,940 are Black women, equivalent to about 16.7% of all practising attorneys, and roughly 36.3% of women attorneys.
A stark gender and racial disparity remains at the senior levels of the Bar.
Figures from the Johannesburg Society of Advocates (JSA), South Africa’s largest Bar with more than 1,200 members, show that although 55% of its members are Black and 39% are women, only 45 of its 238 senior counsel were Black at the end of 2025, including just eight Black women.
Of the 238 senior counsel, 171 were white, including 148 white men.
The JSA also recorded significant attrition among junior counsel, with 272 of the 406 juniors who left the Bar over the preceding five years being Black, including 108 Black women.
Against this backdrop, the judiciary has made considerably greater progress on gender representation, Kubayi said back in April that women accounted for 124 of 255 judges, or 48.6%.
This represents a dramatic transformation from 1994, when there were 165 judges, of whom 160 were white men, three were Black men and two were white women, and there were no Black women judges.
Research published by University of Cape Town Sociology researcher Tamlynne Meyer similarly found that women remained marginalised in the senior ranks of South African law firms despite the country’s legal and policy framework promoting equality.
Meyer’s study, which examined the experiences of 27 women attorneys across three corporate law firms, found that women made up the majority of law graduates and new entrants into the profession, but represented only 28% of partners.
Meyer found that women faced a higher likelihood of leaving legal practice before reaching partnership and that child bearing and child rearing could significantly delay career progression, due to a highly competitive, male-dominated professional culture that often failed to accommodate care responsibilities.
For Kubayi, the next phase of transformation therefore requires the legal fraternity to turn representation into substantive power, and to ensure that women who have reached the top actively create space for those coming behind them.
