Yesterday, Sandra Day O’Connor was laid to rest. As I listened to a story about her time as the first woman to be appointed as an Associate Justice, this statement caught my attention:
“When she first arrived, there wasn’t even a women’s bathroom anywhere near the courtroom.”
This statement suggests women hadn’t served as clerks, and it sent me in search of the history of women as clerks for Supreme Court justices. In 1944, Lucile Lomen became the first woman selected to clerk for Associate Justice William O. Douglas. Few women walked the halls of the Supreme Court building until Justice O’Connor was confirmed to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court 37 years later.
Women are still underrepresented. Between 2005 and 2017, the data show that women have been 34 percent of SCOTUS clerks. In 2018, Justice Brett Kavanaugh hired only female clerks. Those four women pushed the number of female clerks to 50 percent that year. By the next year, men were in the majority again.
Law or Motherhood
A 2021 Politico article posits a reason few women have been selected to serve as Supreme Court clerks. Sarah Isgur, the article’s author, points out that there is an expectation that Supreme Court clerks have several clerkships with other courts before serving on the highest court. She suggests that the additional time required to do these “pre-SCOTUS clerkships” may interfere with the biological clocks of women who want to have children.
How many of these women are Black, Brown, or Asian? We do not know.
The race/ethnicity data show that 4 percent of clerks were African-American, 9 percent were Asian-American, and 1.5 percent were Hispanic. But it doesn’t disaggregate for gender. Data reported in this way ignore the importance of race for gender data and gender for race/ethnicity data. This reminds me of the book title, “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: But Some of Us Are Brave.”
Peaceful Holiday Season
As I think about all the wars going on, Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Hamas, the Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, or the court cases to restrict a woman’s reproductive health options, I imagine a more equitable and peaceful world if more women (not just white women) were the lawmakers. This holiday season, I wish peace for us all.
