When Jacqueline Leong SC became the first woman in Hong Kong’s history to be appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1990, and the first woman to chair the Hong Kong Bar Association in 1992, it marked a watershed moment for Hong Kong’s legal profession. Yet, over three decades later, the statistics reveal a profession still grappling with retention.
As of May 2026, women constitute 32.4% of practising barristers in Hong Kong, a modest improvement from 30% five years ago. Among Senior Counsel, however, women comprise merely 16.5%: 18 women among 109 silks currently in practice. Meanwhile, nearly half of the current pupillage cohort is female. The pipeline exists. Something, clearly, goes amiss along the way.
Readers in London will recognise the phenomenon. The Bar Standards Board’s most recent Diversity at the Bar report, covering data as of December 2025, records that women now make up 41.9% of all practising barristers in England and Wales, and a historic high of 60.3% of pupils. Yet women represent only 21.5% of King’s Counsel. In the most recent silk round, announced in January 2026, 96 new KCs were appointed: 67 men and 29 women. Female applicants achieved a success rate of 34% against 28% for men, a meaningful difference. But only 86 women applied out of 325 total candidates, a figure plainly disproportionate to the eligible female population at the Bar. Women succeed when they apply. Far fewer choose to.
Why? The answers are neither mysterious nor unique to any one jurisdiction. As of December 2025, 41.2% of female barristers in England and Wales provided primary care for a child, compared with 23.2% of male barristers. Self-employed practitioners, as barristers invariably are, have no employer and thus no statutory maternity entitlement. The financial interruption of early parenthood falls heavily and unequally. A landmark joint survey by Mayer Brown and Women in Law Hong Kong, published in January 2023, found that nearly a quarter of female respondents had been told to change their legal speciality or career path, at a rate five times that recorded for men. Women were often advised to go into family law, perceived as ‘softer’, rather than criminal or commercial work thought to demand greater aggression. The research also revealed that women with childcare responsibilities were frequently regarded as less committed or less capable of taking on new challenges.
These are not comfortable stories, but they are not new ones either. What is perhaps striking is how uniform the pattern appears across every major common law Bar: majority-female entry cohorts thinning progressively to small minorities at silk. The disparity cannot be explained by ability or application success rates. Research suggests that men and women enter the profession with similar levels of ambition. The difference lies in what happens next: negative experiences compound over time, gradually eroding women’s professional aspirations and pushing them away from advancement. The attrition appears instead at earlier stages, in decisions not to remain, not to progress, not to apply.
Hong Kong has made genuine efforts to address these challenges, though progress remains frustratingly slow. The Bar Association established a Standing Committee on Equality and Diversity in 2018. In 2019, the Bar Council’s proposed scheme to provide a one-off subsidy of HK$20,000 to a barrister within six months of the birth of a child was shelved following consultation with members. Half of the 18 practising female silks were appointed to the Inner Bar in the last nine years. In 2024, the number of female appointees exceeded that of men for the first time, two to one. History repeated itself in 2025. In 2026, however, only one of six appointees was a woman.
The case for change extends beyond simple fairness. The Bar is losing some of its brightest minds to structural disadvantage, a loss felt by clients and courts alike. A profession that draws on the full range of human experience brings greater depth to legal reasoning and a greater range of perspective to advocacy. This bears directly on the quality of justice delivered and matters profoundly for public confidence in the administration of law.
The Hong Kong and English experiences suggest that structural issues require structural responses, but that these achieve little without the sustained commitment of individuals. Reliable data collection has begun to expose patterns, but the decisions that shape a junior barrister’s career, such as the distribution of work within chambers, the assumptions made about availability, and the encouragement or discouragement offered at formative and important stages, remain largely in the hands of senior practitioners. That is where meaningful cultural change most naturally begins.
The younger generation entering our profession understandably expects more. They see no contradiction between excellence at the Bar and a sustainable career. That common law jurisdictions separated by thousands of miles produce such strikingly similar patterns suggests they are not local anomalies but features of a shared professional structure. Continued dialogue across those jurisdictions, of the kind the Middle Temple has long fostered, is among the more practical tools available to us. The road ahead requires patience and persistence, but the destination remains worth pursuing.
Catrina Lam SC is a member of the Hong Kong Bar and practices from Des Voeux Chambers. She is a member of the Hong Kong Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Equality and Diversity. A former Middle Temple Scholar, she has served as the Secretary for The Middle Temple Society in Hong Kong since 2009 and was appointed an Honorary Member of the Middle Temple in 2018.
