Some of Britain’s most powerful judges, including a serving member of the supreme court, along with about 150 leading barristers, are members of the Garrick Club, which has repeatedly blocked attempts to allow women to join.

The roll-call of the legal profession also includes five appeal court judges, eight high court judges, dozens of serving and retired judges, current and former ministers in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and numerous senior solicitors.

The Garrick gentlemen’s club has close association with the legal profession, but the full extent of those ties has never previously been made clear. Members say senior judges gather regularly at the club’s communal dining table. “Business is not meant to be discussed in the club – but it is,” one former member said.

The memberships of judges from England and Wales, revealed in a Guardian investigation, provoked anger from female lawyers.

Helena Kennedy, a barrister and Labour member of the House of Lords, said: “We should be outside the door with banners. It should be mentioned to senior level judges, who are supposed to promote fairness and equality, that it’s not appropriate to be in a club that does the opposite.”

The first female president of the UK supreme court, Brenda Hale, has previously expressed shock at how many eminent judges are members of the Garrick. She said judges “should be committed to the principle of equality for all”.

Christopher Bellamy, a Conservative peer and parliamentary under secretary of state in the MoJ, is a member alongside his Conservative colleagues Robert Buckland and Michael Gove, both former justice secretaries, and the former attorney general Dominic Grieve.

Several of the country’s most senior judges are members, including the supreme court judge David Richards, the appeal court judges Julian Flaux (head of the chancery division), Keith Lindblom (senior president of the tribunals), Andrew Moylan, Peter Coulson and Charles Haddon-Cave (chair of the independent inquiry on Afghanistan).

Garrick members often argue that they gain no professional advantage from membership because rules prohibit using the club for work. Others point out that they voted for women’s admission in 2015, when 50.5% of members were in favour, falling short of the two-thirds majority required for a rule change. A new vote is expected to be held in June.

Lady Kennedy said these arguments were beside the point. “The ice-cream tie they wear is a statement about exclusivity. It says: ‘I belong to a very special group of people.’ And that is about power. To exclude women from those arenas of power is unacceptable,” she said. The Garrick tie has salmon pink and cucumber green stripes.

The US federal code of conduct for judges states that they “should not hold membership in any organisation that practises invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin”, adding that such membership “gives rise to perceptions that the judge’s partiality is impaired”.

“We should set out a similar set of principles to what they have in the US,” Kennedy said.

Lady Hale, who was supreme court president until her retirement in 2020, repeatedly called out her colleagues for their membership. “I regard it as quite shocking that so many of my colleagues belong to the Garrick, but they don’t see what all the fuss is about,” she told a law diversity forum.

The concentration of lawyers and judges in the club gave members access to gossip and knowledge that non-members could not access, she said in a 2017 interview. “My objections to the Garrick is not to a men-only club. It’s to judges being members of a men-only club. They wouldn’t dream of being members of a club that excluded people from ethnic minorities [or] a club that excluded gays, but for some reason they seem to think it’s OK to be members of a club that excludes women.”

High court judge members include Robert Miles, William Trower, Nicholas Hilliard, Christopher Butcher, Nicholas Lavender, Nicholas Cusworth, Robert Hildyard and Ian Dove.

Three deputy high court judges – Philip Havers, James Strachan and James Lewis – and at least a dozen circuit judges also belong to the club, as do the two lords David Neuberger, a former president of the supreme court, and Jonathan Sumption, a retired supreme court judge.

The club is symbolic of wider diversity problems within the judiciary. Official judicial organisations are sensitive about the slow progress towards introducing greater diversity into the profession, despite years of initiatives trying to do so.

An increase in the number of women studying law at university has meant that 59% of new junior barristers are women, but that ratio declines within the first five years of practice, in part due to the challenges the profession poses to parents. Only 20% of king’s counsels (KCs), the most senior barristers in England and Wales, and just two of the supreme court’s 12 judges, are women.

Although most of the judges who are Garrick members are in their 60s and 70s, the club continues to attract much younger lawyers at earlier stages of their careers, and a number of new KCs have joined in recent years.

Bar Council research has shown that male lawyers’ earnings are higher than women’s at every level of the profession, with women earning 17% less in the first three years of work and the differential stretching to 30% at 11–15 years. The research suggested the difference in earnings between men and women was not narrowing. It also found that the average black barrister earned markedly less than the average white barrister.

A government paper on diversity in the judiciary found that “individuals from an Asian/Asian-British or black/black-British background were less likely to be recommended for appointment relative to white candidates”.

“It has been 103 years since women were publicly granted entry to the bar, yet the tradition of exclusion on the basis of gender continues in private,” said a spokesperson for Her Bar, a new group working to support women’s careers as barristers that was launched by Nasreen Shah and Rachel Bale.

“This wilful exclusion of women from networking spaces has a profound effect on women at the bar, and often has the desired effect of triggering impostor syndrome, preventing women from even trying to penetrate a world that is wholly unwelcoming.”

Lawyers and campaigners have repeatedly attempted to raise the issue of the club’s membership rules, without success. Two years ago more than 300 senior lawyers signed an online petition at womenatthegarrickclub.org claiming the club contributed to “the gross under-representation of women at the top of the legal profession”.

Some female lawyers believe their male colleagues’ membership of the Garrick could have an impact on their sensitivity to legal issues affecting women.

John Mitting, the chair of the public inquiry into undercover policing examining the abuse of women by police spies, was called out for his Garrick membership at the inquiry’s opening session in 2020.

Questioning his ability to tackle issues of institutional sexism, Phillippa Kaufmann KC said: “Like many high court, supreme court, court of appeal judges, you’ve been a member of the Garrick Club, which expressly excludes women from membership.”

Andrew McFarlane was a member of the club in 2017. He was appointed to head the family division and head of family justice in 2018 and stopped being a member of the club at about that time.

The judges and ministers were contacted for comment. A spokesperson for the judiciary said: “The judiciary does not comment on the personal affairs of individual judges.” Buckland said the club was a place where members socialised and business was not discussed. The Garrick was also approached for comment.

Additional reporting by Morgan Ofori