Watching Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testifying on September 27th before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee really brought home the image of the Senate as still being an old boys’ club. There you had a cast of old Republican senators sitting in judgement of Dr. Ford, preferring to have hired an Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell to ask questions on their behalf. This was of course a political stunt to avoid giving the impression of a bunch of old guys ganging up on a woman. What’s worse, the whole circus was conducted as if it were a criminal trial instead of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
This event brings me back to a recent study by the Pew Research Center in the U.S. which looked at the proportion of women to men in senior positions in governors’ seats, state legislatures, Congress, businesses and education institutions. What the study found is that only 20 percent of Congress is women, although women make up over half of the American population. Women represent about 22 percent of senators. The density of women in the House of Representatives is just below 1 in 5. In both cases, most women are Democrats. Hopefully, there could be more than 60 women who assume new seats in Congress after this November midterms — most of those women being Democrats. In addition, the Center found that Democratic presidents have had more heavily female Cabinets than Republican administrations. There are far fewer women in Trump’s Cabinet than there were in Obama’s.
Other Western countries have achieved much more equality of government representation than the U.S., and even Canada. Moreover, Judge Kavanaugh comes from a primarily white male environment, attending the right prep schools and having the accepted middle-class conservative pedigree. What’s there not to like, especially within the old boys’ club in Washington. There are currently only three female associate judges on the nine member Supreme Court, with the one existing vacancy. Just for once, maybe the President could have considered nominating another respected female jurist to the Supreme Court, conservative or otherwise. However, unfortunately we know what Donald Trump thinks about women!
FROLITICKS 