When trying to join the São Paulo judiciary, in the mid-1980s, current judge Silvia Rocha had to face a battery of questions. Not about the legal knowledge that candidates are expected to be able to present in the oral test of the public examination for the position.
“They asked me if my husband approved of me being a judge, why he agreed and how I was going to run a supermarket and give a sentence”, she says. “I remember that the test for male candidates lasted a maximum of five minutes. Mine lasted more than half an hour.”
Despite the strange and sexist questions, Rocha was approved and joined the list of judges in the state of São Paulo in 1985. More than 40 years later, she became the first woman from the history of the Court of Justice of São Paulo to occupy the position of Inspector General of Justice.
Part of the Judiciary since 1987, judge Luciana Almeida Prado Bresciani assumed, in February 2026, the presidency of the court’s Public Law Section. It is the first time that women have been elected to top positions at the TJ-SP, in its 152 years of history.
Bresciani’s trajectory has similarities with that of the inspector general, showing that gender barriers were not isolated incidents. When she was approved for the judiciary in 1987, the 23-year-old was the subject of a report in Jornal da Tarde.
“We were in the news because nine women entered that competition”, explains Bresciani. The title of the text reads: “The Court gains 9 happy (and committed) judges”. But she was not the one interviewed: the report heard her husband. “Which isn’t even in the legal field, right? If he were still a magistrate…”, laughs the judge.
Women began entering the judiciary in 1981, just a few years before Rocha and Bresciani arrived as judges. Over the decades, they have occupied space in the first instance and, today, they are 38% of the total number of active judges in the state, according to data from 2025. The number is still smaller than the female population, which reaches 51% of the total number of Brazilians.
Still, it is greater than the total number of women who make up the second instance. There, there are only 17% of the total number of judges in São Paulo. In 2023, the CNJ (National Council of Justice) created a gender alternation rule in filling these vacancies, throughout Brazil.
According to the CNJ rule, in promotions based on merit —that is, those that evaluate the judge’s performance—, positions should be filled alternately by judges of first instance.
The TJ-SP used the rule in 2024, promoting the judge Maria de Fátima dos Santos Gomes. She took office as judge even after a group of magistrates filed a lawsuit against the competition being held only for women.
At the inauguration of Santos Gomes, the then president of the court, Fernando Antônio Torres Garcia, said that, in the state of São Paulo, “a judge was never not promoted because she was a woman”. There has never been a judge president of the TJ-SP. In the country, only ten courts are presided over by them.
The two judges who took up positions at the top of the court this year say that the smaller presence of women should be alleviated over time. In addition to the merit criterion, they explain, there is seniority for promotion.
“The career is slow, you climb the career ladder as you get older. The late entry of women meant that it took a while for there to be women in the position of judges long enough to be able to compete for the positions”, argues Rocha.
Both say that they do not feel discriminated against by their peers in the Judiciary and are cautious about statements that there is a difference in the way women and men judge issues relating, for example, to causes of sexual violence or those relating to childhood.
“There are men and women who are more or less sensitive, more or less attentive, more or less concerned, regardless of gender”, says Rocha. “I see this a lot here in the General Inspector’s Office, where we have complaints regarding both male and female judges who are rude, not very attentive, who do not understand issues related to the gender perspective. It really is a question of sensitivity, of character, of good will, of seriousness.”
Despite this, they say they recognize that there is a legitimate concern about the smaller number of women in positions of power in the Judiciary.
“Women still suffer a lot, they are treated by many men as if they were their property, they are killed, they are murdered, they are disrespected in every way”, says Bresciani. “In this aspect, the visualization of women in top positions is very important so that every girl knows that she can get wherever she wants and that she does not need to tolerate aggression.”
