The XX Factor: What women really think.

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  Madame Justice

  Posted Friday, May 01, 2009 2:00 PM | By E.J. Graff
  Emily, you aren't convinced that the next USSC justice has to be a woman? I'm startled. If there were eight women and only one man in the Article III branch of government, you can be sure there would be outrage among the minority sex. (Men are a slight minority in the world, since females make up 51 percent of the planet, more or less, except maybe in China.) Women and men have different enough experiences in the world that I find it shocking that we aren't equally represented in all branches. (Okay, maybe that would be hard in the presidency, unless it went back and forth from one to the other.) The U.S. ranks 71st on a list of percentage of women in the lower house of the world's national legislatures, well below such feminist countries as Suriname, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Namibia, and Honduras. The Nordic countries, with the highest percentage of women in legislatures, also have some of the most family-friendly laws in the world—which is hardly a coincidence. Surely an array of female judges with different political perspectives would help our top court better reflect our national realities? Justice isn't blind, you know.
  
  Filed under: Supreme Court, souter replacement, women in legislatures

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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