Women in the U.S. Judiciary - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The number of women in the United States judiciary has increased as more women have entered law school

Law school

A law school is an institution specializing in legal education.- Law degrees :- Canada :...

Breaking into the field of law

The entry of women into the legal profession was continuously thwarted by the general impression that women were unfit (both too tender and not intelligent enough) to practice law. In 1875, the Wisconsin Supreme Court

Wisconsin Supreme Court

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is the highest appellate court in the state of Wisconsin. The Supreme Court has jurisdiction over original actions, appeals from lower courts, and regulation or administration of the practice of law in Wisconsin.-Location:...

denied Lavinia Goodell

Lavinia Goodell

Rhoda Lavinia Goodell was the first woman licensed to practice law in Wisconsin....

admission to the state bar on the grounds that “[n]ature has tempered woman as little for the juridical conflicts of the court room, as for the physical conflicts of the battle field. Womanhood is moulded [sic] for gentler and better things.”

In 1872, the United States Supreme Court affirmed a decision from the Supreme Court of Illinois

Supreme Court of Illinois

The Supreme Court of Illinois is the state supreme court of Illinois. The court's authority is granted in Article VI of the current Illinois Constitution, which provides for seven justices elected from the five appellate judicial districts of the state: Three justices from the First District and...

that denied Myra Bradwell

Myra Bradwell

Myra Colby Bradwell was a publisher and political activist. She was the first woman to be admitted to the Illinois bar to become the first female lawyer in Illinois in 1892.-Life:...

admission to the state bar. The state Supreme Court had reasoned that because state law invalidated any contract entered into by a married woman without the consent of her husband, women (most of whom would be married) could not adequately represent her clients. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, noting that even though some women might not actually be married, such women were the rare exceptions. In 1873 Belva Lockwood was admitted to the Washington, D.C. bar only after a yearlong battle.

“The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil [sic] the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based upon exceptional cases.” Bradwell v. Illinois
Bradwell v. Illinois
Bradwell v. State of Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 , was a United States Supreme Court case that solidified the narrow reading of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and determined that the right to practice a profession was not among these privileges...

, 83 U.S. 110, 141-42 (1872).

Slowly, courts came to accept women in the role of legal practitioner. In 1878, Clara Shortridge Foltz

Clara S. Foltz

Clara Shortridge Foltz was the first female lawyer on the West Coast. She was the sister of U.S. Senator Samuel M. Shortridge...

became the first woman to be admitted to practice law in the State of California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

. To do so, she had to lobby the state legislature to remove the gender restriction in the law.
Nonetheless, after her legislative success, she was still denied admission to the state’s Hastings College

Hastings College

Hastings College is a private, undergraduate, four-year, residential liberal arts college in Hastings, Nebraska, USA.- History :The college was founded in 1882 by a group of men and women seeking to establish a Presbyterian college dedicated to high academic and cultural standards...

of law on the grounds that women would “distract the attention of the male students.” Ms. Foltz only gained admission to the state school after arguing her case to the California Supreme Court, which garnered her what was then considered high praise from one of the seated justices: “You are not only a good mother; you are a good lawyer.” In Washington D.C., Belva Lockwood lobbied Congress on three separate occasions to change the Supreme Court admissions rules to allow a woman to argue before the court. Her efforts succeeded, and in 1879 she became the first female lawyer to argue before the highest court in the country.

Tokenism and early female judges

Even as women began to break their way into the practice of law, the fight to attain judgeships was still gearing up. The first women to ascend to these positions were often appointed to part-time positions as ‘token

Tokenism

In the arts, employment, and politics, tokenism is a policy or practice of limited inclusion or artistic and/or political representation of members of a traditionally marginalized group, usually creating a false appearance of inclusive practices rather than discrimination, intentional or not...

’ representatives of their sex, rewarded for their enterprising fortitude. For example, in 1884, the District of Columbia trial court appointed Marilla Ricker to the position of United States Commissioner. In 1886, the first woman to graduate from Pennsylvania Law School was appointed master in chancery for the city of Philadelphia. By 1907, Evanston, Illinois

Evanston, Illinois

Evanston is a suburban municipality in Cook County, Illinois 12 miles north of downtown Chicago, bordering Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, and Wilmette to the north, with an estimated population of 74,360 as of 2003. It is one of the North Shore communities that adjoin Lake Michigan...

elected a woman, Catherine Waugh McCulloch

Catherine Waugh McCulloch

Catherine Gouger Waugh McCulloch was an American lawyer and noted suffragist.She was a pioneer for American women in the legal profession. She was active in campaigning for women's suffrage and legislation granting equal rights to women...

to serve as a justice of the peace

Justice of the Peace

A justice of the peace is a puisne judicial officer elected or appointed by means of a commission to keep the peace. Depending on the jurisdiction, they might dispense summary justice or merely deal with local administrative applications in common law jurisdictions...

.

Another pioneering woman to take the role of a judge was Georgia Bullock in 1914. The court over which she presided, however, did not resemble those of her “fellow” judges. Judge Bullock was the “woman judge” of Los Angeles

Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

, in charge of a court segregated

Sex segregation

Sex segregation is the separation of people according to their sex.The term gender apartheid also has been applied to segregation of people by gender, implying that it is sexual discrimination...

by sex where “she would serve as a model of Victorian

Victorian morality

Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of people living at the time of Queen Victoria's reign and of the moral climate of the United Kingdom throughout the 19th century in general, which contrasted greatly with the morality of the previous Georgian period...

ideals of womanhood for female misdemeanants.”
The purpose of the L.A. women’s court ran parallel to the culture attitudes of the time; “the purity of women and in their vulnerability to the sexual demands of the "stronger" sex provided acceptable reasons for setting aside public spaces where acculturated women could provide protection and guidance to weak and resourceless women.” Judge Bullock considered her appointment important, not because of concerns of equality, but rather because she felt women would be better served by a woman judge who could tell the “good girls” from the bad and help them reform their ways.

In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment

Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen to be denied the right to vote based on sex. It was ratified on August 18, 1920....

was ratified, granting women the right to vote and ushering a new era of women’s rights. During this time, women began assuming judgeships, through both appointment and election. However, many of these women were the same handful who had broken ground in the end of the 19th Century. For example, in 1925, the first female lawyer in California, Clara Shortridge Foltz

Clara S. Foltz

Clara Shortridge Foltz was the first female lawyer on the West Coast. She was the sister of U.S. Senator Samuel M. Shortridge...

, was considered for a federal judgeship at the age of 76. Florence Allen became both the first woman to be elected to the positions of general jurisdiction court in 1920 and the first female state appellate judge through her election to the Ohio Supreme Court in 1922. She would later become the first female federal appellate judge, appointed to the 6th Circuit

United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts:* Eastern District of Kentucky* Western District of Kentucky...

in 1933. The Los Angeles Women’s Judge Georgia Bullock was finally appointed to an ‘official’ judgeship in 1931. The first female judge to serve on a federal district court

United States district court

The United States district courts are the general trial courts of the United States federal court system. Both civil and criminal cases are filed in the district court, which is a court of law, equity, and admiralty. There is a United States bankruptcy court associated with each United States...

, Burnita Shelton Matthews

Burnita Shelton Matthews

Burnita Shelton Matthews was a judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. She was the first woman appointed to serve on a U.S...

, was not appointed until 1949 (to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia

United States District Court for the District of Columbia

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia is a federal district court. Appeals from the District are taken to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit The United States District Court for the District of Columbia (in case citations, D.D.C.) is a...

).

Beyond the courts of general jurisdiction

General jurisdiction

A court of general jurisdiction is one that has the authority to hear cases of all kinds - criminal, civil, family, probate, and so forth.-Courts of general jurisdiction in the United States:All federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. Many U.S...

, the specialized state courts also saw a rise in female judgeships. Many considered specialized courts more appropriate to the tasks of female judges; in these positions their positive womanly characteristics could be used to resolve issues such as juvenile crimes and domestic relations

Domestic relations

In the common law tradition, the law of domestic relations is a broad category that encompasses:* divorce;* property settlements;* alimony, spousal support, or other maintenance;* the establishment of paternity;...

. Also, the “token” aspect of female judges was seen in the temporary appointment of women to positions of prominence, such as the three female judges temporarily elevated to the Texas Supreme Court

Texas Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of Texas is the court of last resort for non-criminal matters in the state of Texas. A different court, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, is the court of last resort for criminal matters.The Court is composed of a Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices...

in 1925 after three male judges recused themselves in a matter involving a fraternal society to which they belonged. While these enterprising women achieved judgeships in the 1920s and 1930’s, the tokenistic and decidedly sexist nature of their appointments would not change for another fifty years.

The rise of the female jurist

By the 1970s, amid the tidal wave of feminist advocacy, the passage of Title IX

Title IX

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a United States law, enacted on June 23, 1972, that amended Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 2002 it was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, in honor of its principal author Congresswoman Mink, but is most...

(which forbade sex discrimination in law schools, among other institutions, that received federal aid), and the empowering ruling of Roe v. Wade

Roe v. Wade

Roe v. Wade, , was a controversial landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. The Court decided that a right to privacy under the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion,...

, women finally began realizing the vision of equal opportunity in judgeships.

For example, when Julia Cooper Mack was appointed to the D.C. Court of Appeals

District of Columbia Court of Appeals

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals is the highest court of the District of Columbia. Established by the United States Congress in 1970, it is equivalent to a state supreme court, except that its power derives from Article I of the U.S. Constitution rather than from the inherent sovereignty...

in 1975, she became the first woman of color, and only the eighth woman total, to be appointed to a court of last resort. By 1993, 60 women had served on the highest court in forty states, the District, and the federal courts. Today, women comprise 26.3% of the judgeships on state courts of last resort, 19.2% of federal district court judgeships, 20.1% of federal appellate judgeships, and 33.3% of the U.S. Supreme Court. The percentage of women working as judges has tended to correlate with the percentage of women in law school a decade earlier. As the American Bar Association

American Bar Association

The American Bar Association , founded August 21, 1878, is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. The ABA's most important stated activities are the setting of academic standards for law schools, and the formulation...

statistics show a 15% increase in the percentage of women attending law school, one might expect a fairly significant rise in female judgeships in the coming decade. However, there remain barriers outside of law school graduation rates that may complicate this seemingly direct causal link.

Gender bias and barriers to entry in the US courts

In the 1980s and 1990s, women began to experience an increase in their access the courts, as employees, judges, and court-users. This increase in access, along with a renewed interest in uncovering underlying discrimination, led many courts to consider the experience that women were having in the traditionally male-dominated court system. In the early 1980s the National Organization for Women

National Organization for Women

The National Organization for Women is the largest feminist organization in the United States. It was founded in 1966 and has a membership of 500,000 contributing members. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S...

Legal Defense and Education Fund and the National Association of Women Judges banded together to push the state and federal courts to review a perceived bias against women that they believed existed in the courts. From 1982 to 1984, the New Jersey Supreme Court

New Jersey Supreme Court

The New Jersey Supreme Court is the highest court in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It has existed in three different forms under the three different state constitutions since the independence of the state in 1776...

created and ran the nation’s first official Task Force

Task force

A task force is a unit or formation established to work on a single defined task or activity. Originally introduced by the United States Navy, the term has now caught on for general usage and is a standard part of NATO terminology...

on Women in the Courts to “investigate the extent to which gender bias exists in the New Jersey judicial branch, and to develop an education program to eliminate any such bias.” The task force found “significant gender bias,” prompting the New Jersey Chief Justice to order the task force to continue its work indefinitely. The New Jersey report garnered significant public attention and prompted other states to consider similar studies in their own judicial branches.

At a 1988 joint meeting of the Conference of Chief Justices

Conference of Chief Justices

The Conference of Chief Justices was created in 1949 after the need for an organization composed of the states and territories top jurists was amply discussed at the American Bar Association and other juridical organizations. The first meeting, organized by the Council of State Governments and...

and the Conference of State Court Administrators

Conference of State Court Administrators

The Conference of State Court Administrators , which was established in 1955 and incorporated in 1982, consists of the state court administrators and equivalent officials in each of the states and territories of the United States. Its mission is to provide a national forum to assist state court...

the participants formulated resolutions directing each chief justice to create a task force in his or her jurisdiction to study “gender bias and minority concerns.” This effort resulted in a comprehensive overview of issues impacting women in the various state judiciaries. Starting in 1992 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the federal judiciary followed suit and sought to investigate any gender bias that might exist in the courts and seek ways to remedy the problems. The progress made by these courts was almost terminated in 1995, when the new Republican

Republican Party (United States)

The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...

majority that swept into Congress under the Contract with America

Contract with America

The Contract with America was a document released by the United States Republican Party during the 1994 Congressional election campaign. Written by Larry Hunter, who was aided by Newt Gingrich, Robert Walker, Richard Armey, Bill Paxon, Tom DeLay, John Boehner and Jim Nussle, and in part using text...

sought to cut off funding that had been provided to run these task forces on the federal level. The new majority “believed that bias task forces by the federal judiciary were both unnecessary and undesirable.” However, the appropriation remained intact and tasks forces, such as Chief Judge Sloviter’s Third Circuit Task Force, could continue to pursue their charters.

Each state and federal circuit task force learned from the successes and mistakes of its peers; some focused more on finding a systemic bias

Systemic bias

Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates.-Bias in...

within the system, while others focused on possible solutions. Overall, there were several general critiques of the existing court setting, both in the perspective of women judges as well as women lawyers and court-users. Though there are several interesting findings made by the task forces, this article focuses on three particular: (1) the lack of politicking and networking available to women judges and women seeking to become judges; (2) inappropriate interactions that take place in courtrooms; and (3) the difficult act of balancing family life with the demands of a legal career.

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

Columbia Law School

Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, is one of the oldest and most prestigious law schools in the United States. A member of the Ivy League, Columbia Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Columbia University in New York City. It offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in...

which included Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Ginsburg was appointed by President Bill Clinton and took the oath of office on August 10, 1993. She is the second female justice and the first Jewish female justice.She is generally viewed as belonging to...

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.

Inappropriate interactions

Many of the task forces found both explicit and implicit unacceptable treatment of female lawyers by male judges. Among the egregious interactions found in this category, a few stand out. First, in 1988, “a senior status federal district court judge refused to address a female attorney as ‘Ms.’ and threatened to hold her in contempt if she persisted in using her birth name rather than her married name.” See Schafran, Gender Bias in the Courts, at 238 (citing Moss, Judge Mrs. the Point, 74 A.B.A. J. 25 (1988).

Examples abound of judges and male opposing counsel calling female lawyers by ‘familiar’ phrases, such as “honey” and “dear” or even disciplining a female attorney with the statement “I’ll tell you what, little girl, you lose.” See Schafran, Gender Bias in the Courts, at 263. On the most offensive and outlandish end of this treatment, a shocking number of women reported unwelcome and inappropriate sexual advances and sexually derogatory statements.

However, in addition to these obvious and over the top examples of gender bias and insensitivity, the task forces found a subtler form of discrimination. One way this would manifest itself would be the way judges treat female litigants. For example, the court found that both women and neutral third-party observers discovered that male judges would pay more attention to male attorneys and had less patience for female attorneys—while neither the male attorneys nor the male judges were aware this behavior had been occurring.

The same obliviousness from male judges towards the treatment of their female colleagues exists when it comes to disparaging remarks toward the women judges. “Less than 1% of male judges report hearing disparaging remarks from colleagues about the competence of female judges and less than 2% report hearing disparaging remarks about the competence of minority judges; Among female judges, 7% report hearing disparaging remarks about female judges, and 11% report similar remarks about minority judges.” See Carrol Seron, Ph.D. et al., A Report Of The Perceptions And Experiences Of Lawyers, Judges, And Court Employees Concerning Gender, Racial And Ethnic Fairness In The Federal Courts Of The Second Circuit Of The United States, 1997 Ann. Surv. Am. L. 419, 457 (1997).

Overall, in several task force reports, women judges have reported that they receive less respect than male judges from lawyers. These reports are backed up other studies that have found women judges receiving consistently lower ratings than their male counterparts. The Ninth Circuit study found that more than half of female attorneys submitted that “they had heard colleagues question female judges’ competency to serve as judges.” These task forces have found that traditional attitudes, that may not be directly visible as gender bias in individual cases, when viewed as a whole make a compelling picture of underlying discrimination directed towards women.

Conflict of family life

Finally, one of the biggest issues that came up in the surveys facing women judges, women lawyers, and women professionals in all capacities, is the issue of managing both a family and a career. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

Sandra Day O'Connor

Sandra Day O'Connor is an American jurist who was the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States. She served as an Associate Justice from 1981 until her retirement from the Court in 2006. O'Connor was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981...

has observed that “women professionals still have primary responsibility for the children and the housekeeping, spending roughly twice as much time on these cares as do their professional husbands.” This uneven split in responsibility often will restrict a woman, not only from spending time at work, but also keep her from the traditional social and political networking required for advancement in the field. The “traditional” response to these problems has been to “give” women a choice of (1) delaying or forgoing family life to focus on a career or (2) place women in a ‘track’ where they will not achieve as much, but will have the opportunity to have a family. Many feminist scholars and women judges reject this view as outdated and inherently unfair to women. The answer, they insist, must require both men and the employers such as courts to share in burden of childrearing.

Famous quotes

“You can’t be shining lights at the Bar because you are too kind. You can never be corporation lawyers because you are not cold-blooded. You have not a high grade of intellect. I doubt you could ever make a living.” - Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow

Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks and defending John T...

to a group of women lawyers. Morello, Bar Admission was Rough for 19th Century Women, 189 N.Y. L. J. 19 (1983).

Breaking into the field of law

Tokenism and early female judges

The rise of the female jurist

Gender bias and barriers to entry in the US courts

The problem of political networking

Inappropriate interactions

Conflict of family life

Famous quotes

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