Sotomayor Hearings Remind Women of Issues Female Attorneys Face
It’s not every day that columnist Kathleen Parker and a legal writer in the New York Times find themselves on the same page, so to speak, politically.
But in their respective articles over the past few days both Parker and Times editor Jill Abramson offered a similar take on the questioning of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor by a nearly all-male panel of Senate Judiciary members last week. The broadcast confirmation hearings, Parker states in a Washington Post Writers Group syndicated column, offered a window on “a now-familiar phenomenon. Women are treated differently than men in such settings.”
It remains to be seen, according to the New York Times article, whether politicians can expect any fallout even remotely akin to the outrage engendered by the committee’s 1991 questioning of Anita Hill, after she accused then-nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
“Professor Hill produced the year of women in the Senate,” says Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), who came under fire for his harsh approach to Hill as a Republican member of the committee in 1991. “That proceeding was a real lesson to me. I heard from so many women who saw themselves in her place, who felt their veracity was being questioned along with hers.”
However, the hearings last week were a reminder that women lawyers still don’t operate on a level playing field, and face challenges in their personal and professional lives that men don’t, both writers say.
