By Julie Menin, The Huffington Post

Much is being made of the historic opportunity for President Barack Obama to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Souter. Articles are trumpeting the tremendous number of women judges and lawyers, without concomitantly questioning why we don’t see more women at the top echelons of law and politics. While the numbers are certainly significantly better than existed a decade or two ago, they are still woefully short of where they should be.


Recently the New York Times ran a front page article subtitled “Opportunities Rising for Women” which excitedly heralded the progress as if we should be mollified with that. Shouldn’t the storyline instead be that women are still vastly underrepresented to a truly astonishing degree? Yes, opportunities are rising but that’s not hard to do when in 1964 just 4 percent of law students were women! Now, almost half of all law students are women yet there are only 200 women federal district and appeal court judges which, according to the American Bar Association, constitutes 25 percent of the bench.

We have only seven women governors, only 17 percent of Congress is comprised of women, and only 25 percent of all elected officials in the United Sates are women despite women comprising 52 percent of the population and despite 9 million more women than men voting in both the 2004 and 2008 Presidential elections. 
I was recently reminded of how far we still have to go when I thought back of my own legal career. In 1994, when I was an associate at a large Washington DC law firm, I had lunch with one of the few women partners at the firm. I had become friendly with her as we toiled away on a large case. I was soon to learn what a rarity that was at this particular firm–fraternization between the women partners and young female associates. There was such a paucity of women partners at the firm that these women stood out-you literally knew their names as it was hard not to. I asked her how challenging her rise to partner had been and she pointedly looked at me and she said “excruciating.” She recounted the trials and tribulations that many women face where she wasn’t given the best cases, had to work even longer hours, and had to do even more to prove herself. Now she wanted to help other women rise to the top. But she warned me that some of the other women partners at the firm didn’t share that sense of lending a helping hand. These women she said, her voice now almost a whisper, “clawed” their way to the top and didn’t necessarily want to encourage others to join them.
During the years I practiced law I certainly saw some of what she was talking about but frankly not much of that. On the contrary, I saw many women at the tops of their fields in law and politics who reached out to mentor younger women in their respective fields and encourage them. As the years went by, though, I saw other obstacles rising in the way of women. The tremendous challenges of raising kids while balancing a demanding and time consuming job, the lack of social networks that women have with golf games, baseball and football games always providing a ready opportunity for men to woo clients and build relationships, the demands that elder care still disproportionately place on women. Women of course can and should be able to play in sporting events and build those same array of contacts, but the reality is that often that is simply not the case. I was speaking recently to Betsey Gotbaum, the highest ranking elected women official in New York City, who told me that when she was first elected, she found out that Mayor Bloomberg had taken the other newly elected city officials, whom were men, to a Yankees game. She recounted that Mayor Bloomberg later told her about it and said “I didn’t think you’d want to come.”
So what does this mean for President Obama? He has a historic opportunity to do so much more than appointing a woman to the Supreme Court, which he absolutely should do. He can explicitly promote the rise of women to the top of the legal and political professions. He can encourage the various women that he has appointed to his Cabinet and senior positions to talk frankly about the challenges they faced along the way. He can establish a mentor program whereby the senior women in his Administration mentor younger women in government. He can promulgate and publicly speak about flex-time policies in his office and various governmental agencies that allow women with children to have the more flexible schedule that allows them to work and rear their children. He can speak frankly about the challenges that still exist. He can create a commission that can better study why still so few women are on the federal bench and elected to political office and how we can combat that. While I may generally not be a big fan of just appointing new blue ribbon commissions and panels, the very creation of such a commission will serve to bring more much needed exposure to these issues. In short, President Obama has a historic opportunity to do so much more than appointing Sotomayor, Kagan, Sears, Wood or any of the plethora of other qualified women to the Supreme Court–he can address head on the gender barriers, obstacles and biases that still exist in law and politics.

For more information about Julie Menin, visit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-menin/ – blogger_bio