Men Interrupting Women
A few things:
- I am currently, and quite randomly, in the midst of a huge obsession with the Supreme Court.
- This podcast is EXCEPTIONAL. Each episode.
- This one talks about something I had never considered: a data-driven breakdown of the frequency with which female Justices are interrupted. What makes it even more compelling is that there is a long-standing procedural rule (almost a mortal sin to violate) that no Justice is to be interrupted once they start speaking.
- Big surprise: the three female Justices are interrupted three times as much as their male colleagues. And interrupted, most often, by them.
In a way, men interrupting women is both a completely unsurprising and completely awful reality, one that women have been dealing with since the beginning of recorded history. As Mary Beard wrote, in her brilliant and compelling book, Women & Power (one that begins with The Odyssey, the first recorded instance of a man telling a woman to "shut up"):
For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you’re saying it.
And she continues later (a point this podcast reaffirms):
We have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.
And then, as female Justices stand their ground (another way, I suppose, of saying what Beard calls "[acting] rather like a man"), they are tagged as being: emotional, intense, feisty, challenging, hard-to-work-with/for, etc. Which is why I continue to agree with her:
You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
And also with my absolute favorite sitting Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
There will be enough women on the Supreme Court when there are nine.
