The 11 Percent Solution
Women are 51 percent of the American population. Yet they will soon constitute merely 11 percent of Supreme Court justices.
Let's face it: without visceral personal perspectives of particular justices, American jurisprudence (and American life) would be very different. Harry Blackmun was Justice Harry Blackmun because he worked for the Mayo Clinic. Earl Warren was Justice Earl Warren because he had run California during the boom years. William Rehnquist was Justice William Rehnquist because he had practiced voter intimidation to keep African Americans from voting in Arizona in the 1960s.
Experience matters. Perspective matters.
So when W -- over the pronounced preference of the First Lady and Justice O'Connor -- appointed a rich white man who had not done anything but government and corporate legal work his entire life to replace O'Connor, he was declaring that representing rich and powerful men matters more than the perspective of womanhood in modern America.
W is all about tokenism, grabbing credit for it when he can. But when he had a chance to appoint someone with real experience and expertise to replace the first woman ever appointed to the court, he balked. He was more personally comfortable with a football-playing prep-school-and-Ivy-League corporate guy than someone who might have raised a couple of kids while fighting off unwanted advances from creepy senior partners at some early 1970s law firm.
Political perspective mattered more than life perspective. And it will be decades before women are the majority of the Supreme Court, despite being the clear majority of law school graduates now.