Women in The United States Judiciary - The Problem of Political Networking

The Problem of Political Networking

In addition to other task forces, the Ninth Circuit's report found that many women believe that a major hindrance to attaining a judicial position is the lack of women "power players" in the connected "old boys clubs" that often influence judicial appointments.

Women judges and women lawyers attribute male-domination of the judiciary in large part to the exclusion of women from the networks that influence judicial appointments. Women lawyers attribute the small number of women appointed to bench and bar committees to the exclusion of women from formal and informal selection processes. A large proportion of women lawyers believe that men have a better chance than women to be promoted to law firm partnerships and to equivalent positions in public law organizations. See Sandra Day O'Connor, The Effects of Gender in the Federal Courts: The Final Report of the Ninth Circuit Gender Bias Task Force: The Quality of Justice, 67 S. Cal. L. Rev. 745, 786-87 (1994).

A recent panel discussion held at Columbia Law School which included Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other women judges, elicited this response from a former Bush (41) administration employee that echoes the task forces findings:

My experience working on federal judicial appointments during the last administration, and this really surprised me with respect to gender, was that, still in this day and age, there was often a conflict between a male candidate, generally a white male candidate, who, although sometimes quite well-qualified, sometimes not in conventional terms, had much stronger political, and sort of patronage, political connections--you know he had been a party chair, state party chair, or contributed in a significant way to the political decision-maker at the state-level--versus a woman with spectacular educational and experiential qualifications. So that was often a real tension in a particular choice, and invariably the patronage politics would win out over the straight qualification. So I guess it led to my conclusion that, absent the sort of political force of identity politics that is first woman, wanting to put a first woman in a district or a circuit that has never had one, or wanting to just have more women or more African-Americans on the bench that women would be even further behind in terms of their representation on the federal bench, even in this day and age.

In a way, this remains a chicken and egg question; until there are a significant number of women in high positions in government and commerce, the connections needed to attain government appointments and judgeships remains in the hands of the entrenched male establishment. The recommendation put forward to remedy the problem is most succinctly put forward by Justice Ginsburg:

"Women hold up half the sky and they will do so in our courts. They need no favors. They need only equal respect for their talent (and equal sharing by men of the job of bringing up the next generation)."

In short, the political system will change, and as long as there remain competent women judge applicants, competent women judges will follow. An additional suggestion includes focusing on 'manifest offices' or jobs from which judges have traditionally been appointed; essentially, to work within the system currently relied on in the appointment process.