Ezra Klein does the arithmetic on the thuggishly stupid question from Kathryn Jean Lopez of Donna M. Hughes’s publisher National Review Online. Lopez tweeted “Are men allowed to be nominated to the Supreme Court anymore?“ Klein posted in reply
Assume that men and women are about equally capable of serving on the Supreme Court and there are about equal numbers of them in the country. The chance that two women in a row might be selected? About 25 percent. That is to say, it’s the same as the chance that you might flip a quarter and see it come up heads both times. And because the two events are theoretically independent (at least in our hypothetical), once a woman has been chosen for the first slot, the chances that a woman will be chosen for the second slot are 50-50. So Kagan, or someone of her gender, had an even shot.
Two women in a row just isn’t very unlikely in an equal world. The 34 male justices we had after women got the vote? Rather more unlikely. The calculator says 0.000000000058. Yipes.
Yup to the math: as equality increases selection really should be expected to approach coin-toss frequencies.
And yup to the reminder that you can judge Donna M. Hughes, women’s studies professor, by the integrity, honesty, intelligence, and commitment to parity of the company she keeps.
Okay, no. It doesn’t work
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Wed, 2010-05-12 20:50.Okay, no. It doesn’t work like that. Not unless the people who are at least somewhat qualified for the position are evenly split by gender. I’m betting there were zero such women at the time women had the right to vote, and even now it’s probably a bit less than 50%. Plus women have only been in the Supreme Court since something like 1980 (I forget the exact year) and justices do not retire that fast. Your complaint is akin to wondering why we don’t often pick 2 black marbles in a row out of a large bag of formerly all-white marbles which only very slowly have been adding black ones. This is the kind of thing which usually takes generations to equalize even under the best of conditions.