Abstract
People ask me sometimes, when—when do you think it will be enough? When will there be enough women on the court? And my answer is when there are nine.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme CourtNienke Grossman offers a much needed overview of the statistical patterns behind the substantial underrepresentation of women in international courts benches. As her inquiry reveals, despite the growing proportion of female qualified lawyers, sex representativeness has hardly improved in recent years. On the contrary, in the absence of special requirements in courts’ statutes or judicial selection procedures, the percentage of women judges has actually stagnated or even declined in some cases. Such acute sex imbalance cannot be attributed to the (contingent) fact that not enough qualified women are available for such highly prestigious positions. Grossman persuasively contests the plausibility of this widespread assumption. Not only is the limited-pool argument fallacious, but, as her analysis suggests, part of the problem might actually be that judicial selection procedures lack transparency and arenotdriven by merit. Instead, nominations of international judges are often used “to reward political loyalty or to advance political agendas”; this practice seriously impinges on the chances of women to be appointed as international judges, as politics (both domestic and international) remains very much a male-dominated sphere.
Highlights
Nienke Grossman offers a much needed overview of the statistical patterns behind the substantial underrepresentation of women in international courts benches
Young reflected on the power of systemic inequalities in an interview I had the honor to conduct more than a decade ago.[9]
Asked whether she thought the challenges that younger generations of women face were different than the ones she encountered in the 1960s and 1970s as a young scholar in the United States, Young observed that, even if overt views about women’s lesser competence might have declined “some of the most basic aspects of gender distinction and oppression remain”; more crucially, she stressed, “there remains a very strong gender division of labor in all societies that continues to expect that care work will be performed primarily by women, much or all of it unpaid in the home, and that housework will be done primarily by women
Summary
Nienke Grossman offers a much needed overview of the statistical patterns behind the substantial underrepresentation of women in international courts benches As her inquiry reveals, despite the growing proportion of female qualified lawyers, sex representativeness has hardly improved in recent years. While the debate over the composition of the international judiciary is relatively new, the issue of women’s underinclusion in public institutions has long been in the spotlight To be sure, this phenomenon is part of a global trend: Women, just as other historically subordinated groups, are far less likely than men to occupy prestigious positions or top jobs virtually everywhere, and the explosive growth of female employment and access to higher education over the last decades has been insufficient to promote real sex equality. The pervasiveness of this liberal model of rights explains why most states are not genuinely engaged in reforming sex-unrepresentative international institutions, as the present situation is not perceived as unlawful
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