The XX Factor: What women really think.

Adjudication Without Representation

I was riveted by Dahlia's vivid description of Tuesday's Supreme Court hearing of the Savana Redding case, which has been followed with interest in my household. Like Redding when she was summarily hustled into a school nurse's office and ordered to disrobe under the scrutiny of school administrators, my daughter is 13 and in public middle school. She immediately got what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also got: To be asked to strip to your underwear, and then shake out your bra and panties, exposing your private parts so that bureaucrats may look to see if you have extra-strength ibuprofen in your underwear, all because some ex-BFF wrongly ratted you out as a drug dealer, is, as Ginsburg put it, "humiliating."

Facebook pages and sexting notwithstanding, I think it's fair to say that there is still no more modest creature on earth than the average adolescent girl. This is the age when the bedroom door is closed almost all the time, and girls in locker rooms develop elaborate, chrysalis-like methods of wriggling out of their clothes and into bathing suits or gym suits without exposing anything. That the male justices on the highest court in the land did not seem to get how Redding felt (an honors student, she left the school permanently after this episode) is dismaying enough; that they took the opportunity to reminisce about their own towel-thwacking locker room youth is hard to believe. Maybe they were so unnerved by frequent repetition of the word "underwear" that they started saying anything that came to mind. One wonders what Redding, now 19, thought as she listened; having hoped to have her situation taken seriously, she instead was obliged to listen to Justice Clarence Thomas guffawing as Justice Stephen Breyer recalled boys in the locker room sticking things into his underwear, or theirs, or whatever, exactly, happened. (But wouldn't even they, as boys, have been embarrassed if whatever was going on had gone on while school officials were intently watching?)

Thinking about this, I realized that the Redding exchange, and E.J.'s post yesterday deploring the tiny representation of women in the Mirror awards for media coverage, are really about the same thing: They are about the need for a proportional representation of women in important places, and the frequent, puzzling absence of same. That there is only one woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, in this day and time, is also hard to believe; if there were a lone male justice among eight females, it seems safe to say that many people would regard this as an unacceptable suborning of the natural order, but the reverse situation never seems to inspire much in the way of widespread objection. I think there have been discussions on this blog in the past about the question of whether female jurists rule differently than male jurists do. I am no expert, but it seems likely to me that in most cases they do not, but that sometimes, crucially, they may. That Ginsburg was the only judge who seemed to understand what Redding went through is a stark reminder that judging also involves reacting as a human being, and that this is why we need women human beings as judges. I don't mean to suggest that no man could have seen the situation as she did; I was chatting with a former criminal defense attorney—and father—who said that even given the special mission of school officials to protect students from drugs and other dangers, he would have ruled this an invasion of privacy. The only bright spot about the Redding case is that it has offered more evidence to my own children, boy and girl, about why women need to be in the workplace and, by analogy, why mom works. My daughter talks now about wanting to be a judge. I think we could use her. 

The Answer To E.J.'s Question of 'What's Missing'...Hint: It Isn't What You Think

E.J., you just asked what's missing from the list of finalists for the Mirror Awards just released by Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Despite the finalists' names that you mentioned (Eric Alterman, Ken Auletta, Seth Mnookin, Clive Thompson, Mark Bowden, Charlie LeDuff and Richard Pérez-Peña), the answer is NOT that women are missing. Among the finalists you didn't call out: Rachel Sklar for her piece in the Huffington Post on a misleading Pentagon story in the New York Times; Evgenia Peretz for her Vanity Fair piece on James Frey; Megan Garber for her commentary for the Columbia Journalism Review.

It's fair to call out the gender imbalance of the list of finalists. There are 23 men and only five women, if you count repeat offenders like Eric Alterman and Rachel Sklar separately for each category in which they appear. But let's not pose a rhetorical question that implies that the list is devoid of women entirely when in fact what it's missing is much murkier: strict gender balance. And as we have already debated on the blog, maybe 50-50 boy-girl splits for all awards is not really a reasonable—or even admirable—goal. Give women an equal education; choose unbiased panels of judges. But after that, if the men are producing the best stuff, then go ahead and let the best man win.

What's missing from this awards list?

I just got this announcement via email: "Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications today announced 29 finalists in six categories in the third annual Mirror Awards competition honoring excellence in media industry reporting."

The winners include such media watchdogs as Eric Alterman, Ken Auletta, Seth Mnookin, Clive Thompson, Mark Bowden, Charlie LeDuff, and Richard Pérez-Peña.

But hmm... something is missing from this list ... whatever could it be?