If Yale is like Harvard, they could probably collect the clerkship application data with reasonable accuracy, since they process a lot of that for us (recs, transcripts, etc.). I don’t think that they want to.

I guess I could go and count, but I’m not sure how relevant it is. To me, the number I’d like to know is what percentage of women that apply for, first, feeder courts, and second, SCOTUS clerkships, get selected versus the percentage of men that apply. That would at least identify where the issue is.

Well, Justin, are we talking about the law schools that most SCOTUS clerks come from? Because at Harvard and Yale, that’s not so.

I’m not sure if that’s entirely correct. Based on my (OK, limited) experience, women do well in law school and make law review in representative numbers. What they tended not to do, at least at my law school, is go for the feeder judges that would get them the USSC clerkship. When we were picking a board for our law review the men who wanted the position lobbied heavily and the women who wanted it barely even mentioned it – - we ended up picking a man. I’m not sure what the solution is here.

Well, we have Susan Estrogen, Hippychick Ann from Feministing, and Jill at Feministe (Usual Suspects, anyone?) all carrying on about h [...]

Sailorman and Josh are right; the underrepresentation of women starts much earlier than the Supreme Court. The ever-narrowing pool of potentials has very few women: students at top schools, members of law review at those schools, the boards of those law reviews, board members who graduate at the top of their class, top grads who apply for circuit clerkships . . . once we get down to women clerking for the dozen or so (male) feeder circuit judges, there’s only a handful.

I mean, no one has ever demonstrated that having more people from underrepresented groups — women, people of color — in positions of power leads to more people from those underrepresented groups finding success in those very fields, have they?

Indeed it does. The new H/R director at an ad agency I worked for in SF in the late 90′s came on board and within the first month she’d fired two of my staffers, both gay men and made a such a bizarre and glaringly-obvious-to-everyone habit of not speaking to, looking at or acknowledging my presence in meetings of as little as three people (her and myself included) that I printed out her four paragraph email about the proper way to order pizza for the agency lunch and used it as my resignation. One less homo she had to look at. All three of us were replaced with women. During the two months I worked with this director she hired one man (married, family…not gay) and sixteen women (this was the big SF boom so hiring was by volume…and I think it’s worth mentioning there were less than 100 employees at the company). Of course the problem, like this one with the law clerks, was that no one could prove the obvious, which was that the director had a gender preference in employees and likely a prejudice against gays.

I’m just saying that in our rhetoric and frustration over discrimination we shouldn’t gloss over the fact that people aren’t without bias just because they are or have been subject to the same. Keeping fresh the discussion on the effect of being in a position of power and handling it responsibly is so important as we move toward equitability for women and any other groups that are marginalized.

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