Ruth Bader Ginsburg: How She Cut Down on Being Interrupted
Not even Supreme Court justices are safe from the “manterruption” pandemic.
A new study of oral arguments from researchers at Northwestern University found that as more women join the Supreme Court—there are three now, the most ever—”the reaction of the male justices and the male [lawyers] has been to increase their interruptions of the female justices.”
Interruptions are often regarded as an assertion of power through verbal dominance, according to the study’s authors Tonja Jacobi, a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and Dylan Schweers, a J.D. candidate at the school. If that’s the case, then women in positions of power should be interrupted less. Yet at the pinnacle of legal power, female Supreme Court justices “are just like other women,” they write, “talked over by their male colleagues.”
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