Can we celebrate gender transformation while sexual misconduct still prevails?

Every August we mark 9 August 1956, the day thousands of women marched to the Union Buildings to demand an end to the pass laws. Seventy years later, a young woman walking into the legal profession faces a different challenge: whether the price of her admission, or her first real brief, will be paid in something other than competence. The practice has a name that circulates in hushed corridors: the “carpet interview”. Sex for a signature. Sex for work. It is spoken of as an open secret, which is precisely how the profession keeps it both widely known and formally invisible. Can we really call this profession transformed when sexual misconduct still scourges it?

“It reduces us to enter into quid pro quo relationships with unscrupulous, corrupt attorneys who want us to pay for a brief. It exposes us to sexual harassment because we must enter into sexual relationships with the men who have the power. All of this is a silent secret – an open secret. It is known by all of us who practise in this profession.”

— Adv Salome Manganye, Pretoria Bar (see When “Yes” Is Not Free – Power, Consent, and the Hidden Tax on Young Women at the Bar)

The data bear this out. The International Bar Association’s 2019 report, Us Too?, the largest survey of its kind, spanning 6 980 respondents across 135 countries, including South Africa, found that one in three women and one in fourteen men in the legal sector had experienced sexual harassment or bullying. Its 2026 follow-up, Raising the Bar: Women in Law, found that one in five women lawyers plan to leave the profession because of workplace conduct, burnout, and blocked opportunity.

Its 2026 follow-up, Raising the Bar: Women in Law, found that one in five women lawyers plan to leave the profession because of workplace conduct, burnout, and blocked opportunity.

Many women enter the law with a genuine commitment to constitutional values and access to justice. Too many leave. Not for want of competence or dedication, but because the environments they work in fail to protect their dignity and safety. Sexual harassment is not a “clumsy flirtation” or “harmless banter”; it is the conversion of professional power into sexual leverage over people who cannot easily refuse. A profession that trades on holding others accountable is strikingly reluctant to hold up the same mirror to itself, especially where the person wielding power is a senior advocate, a principal, or the very person whose sign-off a candidate attorney needs in order to practise.

As Chrissy Blouws of the Women’s Legal Centre has observed, the hierarchies built into every workplace mean women are routinely subjected to overt or subtle harassment through physical conduct, inappropriate comments, or messages sent on platforms meant for professional communication (see full article).

Signs the Profession Is Trying to Get Its House in Order

There is institutional acknowledgement that change is underway. The DGRU hosted a sector-wide colloquium at which the Chief Justice delivered the keynote address, and the Legal Practice Council, in attendance, committed to revising its harassment policy. Our own research into why survivors do not report has tried to locate exactly where, and why, the system fails them.

Last Women’s Day, the judiciary formally declared zero tolerance for sexual harassment for the first time, aligning institutional practice with the constitutional values of dignity, equality, and justice. That commitment carried through into the JSC’s findings of sexual harassment and gross misconduct against Judge President Mbenenge, which resulted in a recommendation for his suspension and removal. On 27 July, the JSC issued a formal statement confirming that it had advised the President to suspend Judge President Mbenenge pending impeachment proceedings.

At this year’s Judges’ Conference, Chief Justice Mandisa Maya used her keynote address to update the judiciary and the public on the rollout of the sexual harassment policy announced on Women’s Day in 2025. The policy is backed by training and awareness programmes that are compulsory for all judges and led by the South African Judicial Education Institute, signalling something important: that ethical leadership is being treated as substantive, not merely symbolic. The Institute has developed a standardised national training course through extensive consultation with judicial officers and experts, tailored to the realities of the courts. An interim Gender Desk has also been established in the Private Office of the Chief Justice, under her direct supervision, to receive and monitor complaints while a permanent Gender Unit is established within the Office of the Chief Justice.

This active and deliberate approach to implementation is a more demanding, and more honest, measure of transformation than a simple headcount. It calls not only for more women to sit on the bench, but also for the active transformation of the institution they will become part of when they get there.

Policy Without Culture Change

Women leaders have been instrumental in ensuring that transformation addresses lived realities, protects dignity, and strengthens institutional integrity. But the burden of that transformation still falls disproportionately on women. Laws alone will not address violence and discrimination. What we need is the will to build policies and procedures that recognise women’s right to just and equitable working conditions, and to apply them without fear or favour. Sexual harassment can be addressed within an accountable system, but until accountability is real, women in the legal profession will keep fighting for the substantive equality that should already be theirs.

Laws alone will not address violence and discrimination. What we need is the will to build policies and procedures that recognise women’s right to just and equitable working conditions, and to apply them without fear or favour.

The limits of policy were laid bare in the April 2026 JSC interviews, when a candidate for judicial office remarked, almost wistfully, that he used to tell his subordinate that she “looked plumpy in those jeans”, and that he only now realised that it’s unconstitutional to do so. This comment was revealing precisely because it framed the policy as a constraint on him, rather than a protection for her. That is the heart of it: a policy can prohibit a remark, but it cannot, on its own, change the mind that saw nothing wrong with making it.

Sanctions change what men may say or do, but they do not yet change what they believe they are entitled to. Until that thinking shifts, until senior men in the profession recognise harassment not as banter restricted by red tape, but as an exercise of power over someone who cannot easily push back, policy will remain necessary but insufficient. It will treat only the symptom while the culture that produces it continues.

The Measure That Matters

When future women practitioners walk into their first firm or chambers, they should inherit a profession in which the “carpet interview” is an ugly piece of history, explained to disbelieving trainees by mentors who lived through it, not an “it is what it is” reality still whispered about amongst women. They should never have to keep the private ledger so many before them have kept: the quiet accounting of what they endured and what they suffered simply to be able to do the work they were qualified to do.

Transformation will not be complete when the numbers on the bench finally reflect the country. It will only be complete when no woman entering this profession has to wonder what she must pay, beyond competence, to belong.

That is the real measure of whether this Women’s Month meant anything: not the policies we passed, but whether the next generation walking into the profession has to ask what they are really here for. Transformation will not be complete when the numbers on the bench finally reflect the country. It will only be complete when no woman entering this profession has to wonder what she must pay, beyond competence, to belong.

This article was written by Dimakatso Nchodu and Vanja Karth