Women wanted – at SCOTUS, and elsewhere

Ruth Marcus’s excellent column in today’s Washington Post makes the case for more XX chromosomes on the Supreme Court.  Seems plain as day to us. But we’d take the argument even further.  There is ample evidence that ALL fields of professional life benefit from opening the doors to women as well as men. It’s simple, if you’re not adding women to the top ranks of your company, hospital, university, government branch, you are not making use of the broadest possible talent pool.

Which is why it’s so essential that President Obama’s nominee to replace David Souter be a woman.

I confess to a certain queasiness in writing that sentence, and in stating the “no men need apply” litmus test so categorically. It’s more comfortable — if not entirely straightforward — to cloak this view in mushy language about the value of diversity of backgrounds and life experiences and perspectives. That’s all true, for reasons I’ll get to later. But the stark fact is that having one female voice out of nine is not consistent with women’s being half the talent pool — actually, Ginsburg said “at least half” — in our society.

That group photo with the diminutive Justice Ginsburg peeking up in a sea of 8 tall men certainly doesn’t look much like America, as Marcus points out.

Image via Wikipedia

Having more than one woman on the Supreme Court is partly a matter of symbolism. Before O’Connor’s retirement three years ago, Ginsburg said in a speech last month at Ohio State, “people could see that women came in all sizes and shapes, we didn’t look alike, and we didn’t talk alike. . . . Now, there I am all alone, and it doesn’t look right.”

As important, though, is the inescapable fact that a female justice — like a justice who’s a member of a racial minority, or who’s served in elective office, or who’s been in private practice — brings a useful set of life experiences to the art of judging. Because it is an art; it involves the exercise of judgment, not scientific measurement.

Those from the umpire school — funny how that’s a male metaphor — would prefer not to think so. In an interview with CNBC shortly after O’Connor’s retirement, Justice Antonin Scalia said that “as far as the product of the court is concerned, it makes no difference at all. I don’t think there’s . . . a female legal answer to a question and a male legal answer to the same question. That’s just silly.”

Sure it is, phrased that way. But life experiences inform the act of judging, and the experience of being a female justice comes into play at certain moments.

via Ruth Marcus – Why More Women Are Needed on the Supreme Court – washingtonpost.com.

But the gender imbalance of America’s highest court is even more absurd than that. It is not JUST life experience which makes women such desirable hires  - on the bench and in the wider world. Women are better educated than men. We have more undergraduate and graduate degrees. Our management skills are increasingly recognized as not only difference but essential. And companies that employ more women find they make more money.

So, from the Supreme Court to the Board Room, the more women are represented, the better off we are.

Katty