President Barack Obama campaigned this past autumn on the promise of hope and change.
Millions bought into his message and voted him into the Oval Office.
I have to wonder whether Obama will in fact change this country for the better. In a break from my usual persona, if nothing changes here in our country, I will not place the blame at Obama's feet.
Instead, I will blame us as citizens and will have to ask: is the United States really ready for change? We may have rallied around the "hope and change" motto, but I am not sure we as a nation really want change in the most traditional avenues of our lives. If change is truly what we desire, don't you think we would have eliminated the constraints on women in the 21st century?
"What constraints?" you may ask. Women can vote, hold CEO positions, run for president and pursue careers outside of marriage and child-rearing. What more do we want? Don't we have every opportunity that a man has?
Yes, women have come great distances from 1903, 1933, 1953 and even 1983. We have indeed entered the professional world and embraced careers as police officers, soldiers, stockbrokers, doctors and lawyers.
And while on the surface it may seem that we have achieved equal status with our male counterparts, the sad truth is that we as women have not.
Don't believe me? Let's take a look at the court system here in Virginia to illustrate my point. I researched six of the Circuit Courts in Virginia to see how many females sit on the benches as judges. Among the 13th, 9th, 20th, 27th, 19th and 4th Circuits - Richmond, Williamsburg, Loudon, Montgomery, Fairfax, and Norfolk, respectively - and the 43 judges that compose them, only five are women. That's approximately 11 percent.
If women are equal to men in terms of having the mental capacity to become attorneys, surely women are equal to men in having the mental capacity to sit as judges on the bench. Why then is the Virginia Circuit Court so lacking in female representation?
In the Virginia Court of Appeals, only five of 15 judges are women. On the Virginia Supreme Court, only three of 11 justices are women. Why are our state's courts barren of females?
Part of the blame lies with Virginia's method of selecting judges to the federal benches. Virginia is the only state in the union that still elects judges solely through the state legislature, the General Assembly.
According to judicial process scholars Carp, Stidham and Manning, women are far more likely to be appointed to a state's Supreme Court if appointed by the governor. Women are less likely to be appointed to the high court if they are elected by the state legislature, as they are in Virginia. The majority of blame, however, lies with us as people and citizens. Why have we not challenged the point that women are proclaimed to be treated as equals and yet in practice are treated as inferior beings?
How come we haven't written to our legislators and demanded a change in how they vote for federal judicial appointments? Why has society not yet fundamentally changed to the point where women are accepted as equals without second thought?
Apparently our fathers' generation of men has yet to accept women as their equals. Will our boyfriends' generation accept us as their peers in all matters? Or must we wait until our sons' generation comes into its own and governs our nation?
Abigail Adams told her husband 220 years ago to "please remember the ladies." Too bad our current society seems to remember women empirically but forget us normatively.
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I am offended by your sexism, you are implying that women need special consideration to be equal to men, which completely contradicts your earlier statement. Among the many flaws of this article you fail to identify a logical reason women are not judges. In fact you didn't mention how many women are approved for judge positions versus men which is information we need. The entire problem could be coincidental, or maybe women don't apply to be judges as often as men, but we would not learn that from you. You say the problem is with the state legislature but you don't identify how they are wrong, how are they barring women from the judiciary? are they? The statistics are interesting but I'd like to know the states that come from if the governors are from blue states and the legislatures sampled are from red states it could be a cultural issue instead of a bureaucratic one. Finally I disagree with your solution to the problem, the state legislature is a more direct representation of public opinion, by putting this responsibility in the hands of the governor we have less of a say in the matter. Governors can not serve consecutive terms and most don't run for re-election. The incentive for a governor to listen to us is much less than a state legislator who constantly worries about re-election.
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"Millions bought into his message and voted him into the Oval Office." How stupid do they feel now?
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The reason women aren't appointed as judges is because women write crap like this column. If you can't be trusted to write a logical college newspaper column, how can you be trusted to be a judge?
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It is not reasonable to expect 50% of elected judges to be female when far less than 50% of legal professionals are female. (Some quick online research revealed that about 25% of lawyers are female.) Women are free to become lawyers, but they tend to choose to go into other careers. I am a graduate student in engineering and 2/3 of my classes don't have any women at all. If a company ends up hiring more men the women for engineering positions, you can hardly blame the company for being sexist. I would rather have the state legislator elect the people who are best suited to become judges than have the governor appoint someone for personal political gain.
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Not only is the current percentage of female lawyers ~25%, it is also on the rise since ~8% in 1980, so assuming you have to have some experience practicing law to become a judge, it isn't unreasonable to see ~11% of judges as females. The important statistics that the author seems to miss are the rates, not the values at a given time. If the number of female judges is drastically declining, maybe something is awry. But if over the past several years there has been an increase, then the author is hosed.
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Adam has a good point. Just looking at the plain data right now easily leads to misinterpretation. I honestly don't remember the last time a woman was treated inferior under direct comparison of similar capability. On the contrary, women in my field (engineering) are more desirable hires than men right now, but the fact is, there isn't enough of them. Trust me, it would actually be really nice to see some women in engineering work spaces because they add diversity and new problem solving methodologies to the field. The fact is that women are underrepresented in time intensive careers (math, science, medicine, law) as a life choice. A recent study (http://www.sciencecodex.com/women_opt_out_of_mathscience_careers_because_of_family_demands) shows women prefer the flexibility of being able to start a family during the most time consuming parts of a career. Now don't let this lead you into thinking I don't think that there are still problems with equality because the world has a large population of jerks, but they aren't the only problem. I will say, however that the article has a good idea about delayed tenure or part time study that should definitely be considered. Seriously, it would be nice to walk into an engineering class and see %50 females, but artificially adjusting the ratios in something like a circuit court isn't really the fix here.
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Uh, the Virginia state government has no authority whatsoever to appoint judges to federal positions. The President appoints judges to the open slots, and the United States Senate confirms them.
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Thanks for the civics lesson Sam. However, this article and discussion is about state courts, not federal courts. (Federal means the national government.)
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The problem, Right..., is the article says "Part of the blame lies with Virginia's method of selecting judges to the federal benches. Virginia is the only state in the union that still elects judges solely through the state legislature, the General Assembly." See, federal benches means the national government.
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Ah, so it does. The author made a typo and meant state. All the stats and voting stuff are about the state courts. It has already been established that this isn't a well researched / written article.
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Agreed on all counts. She hardly makes the case about the intellectual prowess of women and the need to place more of them in the courts with this article. It's, ummm, ironical.
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Yes, there are many, many reasons why women are not well-represented in the Virginia State Court system. Among these possible reasons: sex discrimination. Typo aside, the author raises excellent points and I commend her for raising questions while most other remain content with the status quo. Like most forms of discrimination, we'd much rather turn a blind eye and pretend it doesn't exist than explore opportunities to promote equity.
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