Men account for around 87% of Queen’s Counsel, 76% of judges, and 11 out of 12 supreme court justices. It took 127 years for the first woman – Baroness Hale – to be appointed a law lord. Prior to 2003, women were invisible and had no adjudicating voice in the most senior court of our country. But a statistic that must give us serious cause for concern is that of 47 Council of Europe nations, only Azerbaijan and Armenia had lower proportions of female members of the judiciary than the UK in 2014.

It is a travesty because it results in numerous anti-women biases in British law. Last month, the court of appeal, for example, reached a momentous decision that recent government legal aid rules unlawfully denied victims of intimate partner violence access to public funding in family law cases. Women who have endured rape and beatings at the hands of their former partners are forced to face their abusers in family courts without legal representation. Some women are even cross-examined by their abuser. So the law provides a route for victimisation of women by abusive ex-partners.

Just 25 years ago marital rape was lawful. The law viewed wives as the subservient chattel of the husband to ensure his sexual gratification. Even today, a wife’s infidelity can be used as part of a defence to murder when a husband kills his wife. Historically, a wife’s infidelity was regarded as “the highest invasion of property”. And yet women who kill their partners in response to suffering years of violence are branded criminals. Another instance of misogyny in legal form is abortion legislation. In 2016, women do not have free, unrestricted access to abortion. Two medical practitioners are required to justify a termination of pregnancy on stringent legal grounds. The law infantalises women, and denies them agency and autonomy over their own bodies.

Prostitution laws are also in disarray. Around 80,000 people, primarily women, are involved in prostitution and 50% of prostituted women in the UK were paid for sex as children. When a child is aged 14-17, the law allows buyers of child sex to use the defence of reasonable belief that the child was over 18. While paedophilia is a criminal offence, the law creates an environment in which children, primarily girls, are prostituted with a worrying degree of impunity.

Girls aged 10 or over are convicted of prostitution-related offences, such as soliciting for prostitution. The Crown Prosecution Service describes “child prostitution” as being a possible “genuine choice”, stating that “only where there is a persistent and voluntary return to prostitution and where is a genuine choice should a prosecution be considered”. Between 2010 and 2013, 15 cautions were issued to children, seven were prosecuted and three were found guilty of prostitution-related offences.

There are endless instances of gender inequality reinforced through the law, such as rape law, pornography law, sex discrimination in the workplace, maternity leave – and the list goes on. I chose to practise law as a barrister because I wanted to support feminists in erasing discriminatory laws against women. I soon realised that this is almost impossible within a legal system infused with sexism. Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst’s mantra more than a century ago recognised that the law constituted one of the greatest obstacles to women’s rights. More than 100 years later, the people writing the law, and enforcing the law, are disproportionately male, white and upper-class.

If we are genuine in our commitment to change, we urgently need quotas for women to accelerate gender equality in the judiciary.

Although 50% of people called to the bar are women, whenever large numbers of men are involved in the hiring and selection process for top posts women fall behind. According to Baroness Hale, the legal elite is responsible for practising “unconscious” sexism. As if to prove her point, Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption claimed that a rush for gender equality among the judiciary would have “appalling consequences for justice” – yes, “appalling” - and women should simply be “patient” and wait half a century for equality, by which point I would be 77. The subtext is clear: women in equal numbers are simply not up to the job. Sumption’s comments exemplify perfectly what is wrong with the way women in the legal profession are viewed by those in the echelons of power.

An effective democracy needs lawyers and judges who reflect the whole population, not an entrenched, privileged clique. Belgium’s constitutional court imposes a gender quota, requiring the court to be composed of at least a third of judges of each gender.

Quotas are ultimately needed because men will not give up their privileged positions unless they are made to. Those in positions of power are all too happy to peddle the myth of meritocracy. A recent Fawcett Society survey, however, showed that 60% of people believe men in top jobs won’t make room for women unless they have to. For fundamental values of freedom, equality, liberty and justice to flourish, we need women to be represented in meaningful numbers among the judiciary. We can’t afford to wait until I’m 77.