Despite not looking anything like the colleague she attended with, a very senior barrister approached and told him it was “really nice to meet your daughter”. When corrected and told Justice Ierodiaconou was just appointed, the barrister followed up with, “Oh, you’re a magistrate?”
The blunder did not end there, with the barrister then having assumed that Justice Ierodiaconou must have been a County Court judge.
“While this was happening, I felt astonished, but I also started to think, is it something I’m wearing? I’m a very approachable person, and I thought, am I being too friendly? Am I not displaying sufficient gravitas?
“Then the academic side of my brain kicked in, and I thought, ‘I’m being stereotyped here’. I don’t know [if] it was because of my age, my ethnicity, my gender, but I had to step back out of myself because it was starting to make me feel like I don’t belong [and] maybe I’m not cut out to be a judicial officer,” Justice Ierodiaconou said.
Source: Supreme Court judge on the biases that shape impostor syndrome – Lawyers Weekly