Trust, however, is not built only by what courts decide. It is built by who decides — and whether the bench reflects the society it serves. On that measure, the region still has far to go. This is where women’s judicial leadership becomes a strategic question, not a peripheral one. 

The data tells the story. Asia has one of the lowest regional averages for women judges globally, at about 29 percent of the judiciary. In South Asia, women are less than 10 percent of judges, and often in single digits in higher courts. [1]  The new UNDP Women in the Judiciary Dashboard — launched at the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women in March 2026 — brings these patterns into sharper focus across more than 120 countries. 

UNDP's regional analysis has named this pattern the Asia-Pacific Justice Paradox: present at the base, missing at the apex. Women enter the legal profession in significant numbers across the region. They qualify for judicial service, sit competitive examinations, and are appointed to the lower courts. Then — somewhere between the entry-level bench and the highest courts — their numbers thin out. 

This is not only a question about women’s careers. It is a question of judicial legitimacy. When the bench reflects the society in front of it, public confidence in the impartiality of the institution grows stronger. For survivors of gender-based violence, women navigating family disputes, women asserting property and inheritance rights, the composition of the courts can shape whether they believe the system is genuinely open to them. Building a more representative bench is, in development terms, a way to deepen the reach of justice. 

And it is, at its core, an institutional question. The barriers to women’s judicial leadership across the region are rarely written into law. They are embedded in practice: in selection and promotion processes that lack transparency, in posting rotations designed without housing, childcare or family responsibilities in mind, in workplace policies that have not yet caught up with the rising share of women in the legal profession, and in implicit assumptions about who is considered “ready” for senior responsibility. Gender-neutral rules that, in practice, are anything but gender-equal. Entrenched biases that go largely unaddressed. None of these are the fault of any individual judge or court. All of them are within the reach of institutional reform if they are named and acted upon. 

This is the shift the region needs to make: from individual resilience to institutional reform. The women who reach the higher courts in this region today are remarkable. The next generation should not have to depend on exceptional resilience to reach the same place. 

Earlier this month in Cox’s Bazar, twenty-five women judges from across the Bangladesh judiciary spent two days with senior judges from the Maldives, Thailand, and Samoa working through this question. Their working groups identified a set of priorities — transparent promotion criteria, family-friendly transfer policies, mentorship structures, and institutional monitoring on gender equality — that the judges intend to carry forward in dialogue with their own institutions. They were not waiting for permission to lead. They were authoring the reform agenda. 

This Colloquium organized in Bangladesh was the fourth in a series convened across Asia and the Pacific over the past year — following Indonesia, Lao PDR, and a Regional Convening in Bangkok in October 2025. What works about the model is straightforward: peer exchange across jurisdictions, evidence-based working groups, and recommendations owned by the judges themselves. A judge in Dhaka hearing how her counterpart in Malé navigated a senior appointment — or how a justice in Apia approached gender-responsive adjudication — is a form of institutional learning that no external presentation can replicate.