Podcast
Strict Scrutiny
The book profiled many women who had been shortlisted for Supreme Court nominations over time, going back further than the Sandra Day O'Connor nomination. The authors were motivated to write it after noticing the pervasive sexism focused on appearance and parenthood status during recent female nominee considerations, leading them to research and document these historical figures.
So to help us appreciate the phenomenon of Supreme Court nominations and in particular a weird notion of women being on the shortlist for Supreme Court nominations, we wanted to have on the show the a...
— Episode: I Want More
Episode: I Want More
The book profiled many women who had been shortlisted for Supreme Court nominations over time, going back further than the Sandra Day O'Connor nomination. The authors were motivated to write it after noticing the pervasive sexism focused on appearance and parenthood status during recent female nominee considerations, leading them to research and document these historical figures.
So to help us appreciate the phenomenon of Supreme Court nominations and in particular a weird notion of women being on the shortlist for Supreme Court nominations, we wanted to have on the show the authors of a recent book shortlisted, Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court.
So this book profiles many of the women who were shortlisted for the Supreme Court over time and it actually goes back pretty far even further back than the O'Connor nomination.
We looked at every article written in the New York Times and the Washington Post going back to the early 1970s about a nominee to the Supreme Court. And so we had thousands of articles, we coded them for over 100 factors and perhaps not surprisingly we were able to show empirically that in fact the media coverage was gendered that for the female nominees it focused more on uniquely feminine attributes.
And one of those women was described in the New York Times as fortunately having no children and maintaining her bathing beauty figure even in her fifties as her qualifications for being on the shortlist.
nine women were officially shortlisted by presidents going all the way back to the 1930s before Sandra Day O'Connor finally became the first to make it off the shortlist and onto the Supreme Court.