I shuffled along the wooden bench to distance myself from him. I looked up and around to see if any of the other barristers had heard but they were fixated on their laptop screens. The comment had disturbed me; I felt very uncomfortable. I’d heard the horror stories of sexual harassment at the Bar and, naively, I thought that it wouldn’t happen to me.

This emphasised to me the practical importance of having better representation of women at the Bar, particularly at the senior end. Women often feel more comfortable talking to other women about sexual harassment or sexism at work.

Even if women are not willing to report sexual harassment to senior women, the mere presence of more senior women may reduce the prevalence of sexual harassment. Had there been more women in the courtroom that day, this barrister might have thought twice about making his ‘joke’. I wondered whether he would be as comfortable saying something like this in the presence of a number of equally senior or more senior women. I highly doubted it.

There was a huge imbalance in the po wer dynamic that morning: I was a pupil barrister and he was a senior barrister. I knew that he had intended the comment as a joke but, frankly, I had no interest in whether or not his penis was circumcised and talking about that with a woman at least 20 years younger, in a courtroom, felt entirely inappropriate. I was in the training year to qualify in the job he was already senior in and he knew this.

Alexandra Wilson: “Fighting for justice is hard enough when you experience sexism on the job”