In the NYT “Week in Review” section yesterday, there’s a story by Adam Liptak on “The Waves Minority Judges Always Make”, about the U.S. Supreme Court. Along the way, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reported on her own situation:
Justice Ginsburg said her own influence in all sorts of cases at the justices’ conferences was uncertain. “I will say something — and I don’t think I’m a confused speaker — and it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point,” Justice Ginsburg said.
The other people at these conferences were seven men and one woman, Sandra Day O’Connor (until early in 2006, when O’Connor retired from the court, after which the others were all men). So the effect Ginsburg was describing was almost surely a familiar one: it’s not on the floor until a man says it; a man has to say it before it will be attended to.
The effect is a facet of female invisibility, especially pronounced in professional settings when there are very few women in the group. My daughter, who fairly often is the only woman in such groups, has commented on the effect a number of times, sometimes with considerable annoyance.
I wonder if it has a name (something better than “a man has to say it” but not as broad as “female invisibility”).
