Not even Ruth Bader Ginsburg is safe from manterruptions
Of the 112 Supreme Court justices in American history, four have been women. Statistically speaking, they get interrupted. A lot. By men.
That means not even Ruth Bader Ginsburg is safe — though she has managed to get interrupted less over time — according to a new study by Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law.
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Professor Tonja Jacobi and doctoral candidate Dylan Schweers studied a public database of Roberts Court oral arguments as well as a database they created to analyze how dynamics changed in the Supreme Court as it added one, two, and three sitting female justices.
According to the authors' post on Scotusblog, the study found that "women still do not have an equal opportunity to be heard on the highest court in the land. In fact, as more women join the court, the reaction of the male justices and the male advocates has been to increase their interruptions of the female justices."
The authors ran a computer algorithm that identified instances of "—" in the court transcripts, implying that someone was interrupted. Of the 7,239 interruptions charted, "32% were of women, but only 4% were by women."
The data proved a "consistently gendered pattern: In 1990, with one woman on the court (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor), 35.7% of interruptions were directed at her; in 2002, 45.3% were directed at the two female justices; in 2015, 65.9% of all interruptions on the court were directed at the three women on the bench."
It's also worth noting that Justice Clarence Thomas is an outlier, having only spoken at 0.4% of cases, though he was still counted in the data.
The study considered the amount of words spoken by gender, seniority, and ideology in why the amount of interruptions may be skewed, but ultimately found that "men actually talk more than women," and "gender is approximately 30 times more influential than seniority," with interruptions occurring "most frequently when gender and ideology are both different."
In other words, female justices are most likely to be interrupted when they're saying something their male opposition disagrees with.
The study points out that "such behavior matters beyond simple rudeness: Oral arguments shape case outcomes. This pattern of gender disparity in interruptions could create a marked difference in the relative degree of influence between the male and female justices." Notably, "the strongest effect is of conservative men interrupting liberal women," though that's not particularly surprising as most of the women in the history of the court have represented varying degrees of liberalism. All of them except for O'Connor, a moderate Republican, were appointed by Democrats.
Interestingly, the study may have found the beginnings of a solution — though it rests on the shoulders of women rather than the men who interrupt them. Women, RBG in particular, who severed longer on the court avoided interruption by "talking more like men." Doing away with polite language like "excuse me," and "may I..." that's common among women reduced the amount of time available for men to interrupt. Fans of Lean In, rejoice.
Erasing polite language doesn't fix the problem fully — "Women continue to be interrupted more than men, and Sotomayor is interrupted despite minimal use of this language," — but over time, the study found that female justices were indeed interrupted less.
So not totally reassuring, but still good to know Ruth Bader Ginsburg at some point probably thought, "F*ck it, I'm not apologizing anymore." And she's been less interrupted ever since.
