1.
RETHINKING GENDER EQUALITY IN
THE LEGAL PROFESSION’S PIPELINE TO POWER:
A STUDY ON MEDIA COVERAGE OF SUPREME COURT
NOMINEES
Hannah Brenner
Renee Knake

2.
1. OUR BACKGROUND
2. OUR STUDY
3. OUR FINDINGS
4. READ MORE

3.
OUR BACKGROUND

4.
Hannah Brenner is an assistant professor at California Western School of Law.
Renee Knake is a professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center and
holds the Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics (effective Aug. 1, 2016). They are
former co-directors of the Kelley Institute of Ethics and the Legal Profession at
Michigan State University College of Law. Prof. Brenner is the former executive
director of the Center for Women in Law at the University of Texas.
We are grateful to MSU College of Law for generous research support of this
project.

5.
OUR STUDY

6.
Rethinking Gender Equality in the Legal
Profession’s Pipeline to Power: A Study on Media
Coverage of Supreme Court Nominees, 84 TEMP.
L. REV. 325 (2012)

7.
WHY

8.
STUDY

9.
THE MEDIA’S DEPICTION

10.
OF SUPREME COURT NOMINEES

11.
AS A LENS TO UNDERSTAND

12.
GENDER DISPARITY IN

13.
POSITIONS OF POWER?

14.
CONSIDER
THE RECENT CEOANNOUNCEMENTS
FOR
MCDONALDS
AND
YAHOO
(BOTH ASSUMED THEIR NEW ROLES IN JULY 2012)

15.
WE OBSERVED A SIMILAR
PHENOMENON

16.
WHEN

17.
PRESIDENT OBAMA
ANNOUNCED

18.
HIS FIRST TWO NOMINEES

19.
TO THE SUPREME COURT

20.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR
AND
ELENA KAGAN

21.
YOU SAW THE
HEADLINES

22.
Elena Kagan v. Sonia
Sotomayor:
Who Wore it Better?

23.
WE

24.
FOUND

25.
THESE

26.
HEADLINES

27.
And so we embarked upon
our empirical study about
the media coverage of
Supreme Court nominees…

28.
Our study begins with the nominations of
Rehnquist and Power in the early 1970’s.

29.
We coded over 50 variables for every article
written about a nominee from the
announcement date until the date of withdrawal
or confirmation appearing in the New York
Times and the Washington Post.
Our collection includes over 4,000 articles.

30.
OUR FINDINGS

31.
We are analyzing the data in phases. The initial
phase focuses on what we call the Introduction
Week, i.e. the first week after a nomination is
announced.
We have five findings from the Intro Week.

32.
Intro Week Finding #1:
On average, female nominees receive more coverage
(in terms of quantity and length of articles) than male
nominees.
Female
Mean(SD)
Male
Mean(SD)
Mean
Differenc
e t-value(df)
Number of Stories 54.2(18.2) 47.7(23.1) 6.5 0.546(13)
Word Count per
Story†
1,081.4(699.8) 959.1(721) 122.3 2.112(680)
*
Note. *p<.05, two-tailed. †Nominees without this variable removed from
analysis

33.
Intro Week Finding #1:
Actual Numbers
NOMINEE PRESIDENT ARTICLE
S
WORD COUNT
Kagan Obama 57 43,887
Sotomayor Obama 78 78,043
Alito Bush 68 66,247
Miers Bush 62 60,023
Roberts Bush 98 94,529
Breyer Clinton 26 31,698
Ginsburg Clinton 44 55,173
Thomas Bush 57 55,185
Souter Bush 55 55,686
Kennedy Reagan 25 23,839
Bork Reagan 43 41,800
Scalia Reagan 44 41,276
O’Connor Reagan 24 30,505
Stevens Ford 21 12,754
Powell * Nixon 29 n/a
*The articles written about Powell and
Rehnquist were retrieved using an
alternate search mechanism which
did not generate word counts, so they
are not included in our analysis for
this variable.

34.
Intro Week Finding #2:
The gender or sexuality of female nominees is mentioned
more frequently than the gender or sexuality of male nominees.

35.
Intro Week Finding #3:
The limited sample of articles tends to show
that appearance of female nominees is mentioned
more frequently than the appearance of male
nominees but more data is needed.

36.
Intro Week Finding #4:
The limited sample of articles reveals that the family life of
female nominees tends to be mentioned more frequently
than the family life of male nominees but more data is
needed.

37.
uth
(1974-Current file); Jun 19, 1993;
Newspapers The Washington Post (1877 - 1994)
Court Choice Conservative by Nature, Not Ideology
N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 7, 2005
As a parent, Judge Alito … spent many hours
coaching the high school mock trial team. He
taught the students, including his son, Philip,
the rules of evidence and how to write
opening and closing statements.

38.
Intro Week Finding #5:
The articles are more likely to be written by male journalists
than female journalists during the introduction week.
Author Position Mean (SD) Mean Difference t-value df
First 0.754 (.43) 0.254 14.881*** 640
Second 0.689 (.46) 0.189 4.684*** 131
Note.***p<.001, two-tailed. Authors were dummy coded with female=0.
Test Value was .5.

39.
So what?

40.
Today, illustrated most recently by the
nominations of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan,
explicit bias against women barring their entry
into the legal profession is in many ways
nonexistent. It has been replaced, however,
with more subtle shades of bias that tend to
center around often inter-related issues of
motherhood, competency, and appearance.
The pervasiveness of these three kinds of bias
is evidenced in the first phase of our Media
Study and we predict that our subsequent
research will offer further support.

41.
READ MORE
Brenner & Knake, Rethinking Gender
Equality in the Legal Profession’s Pipeline to
Power: A Study on Media Coverage of
Supreme Court Nominees
84 TEMP. L. REV. 325 (2012)
Download on SSRN