Post #28

Now a Supreme Court Justice, the media perceived Sonia Sotomayor as being “too temperamental and aggressive”, “dumb, lazy, temperamental” and “fiery Latina tempest waiting to knife and brutalize lawyers in the courtroom.” This was all before she was even nominated for the Supreme Court. And these perceptions of her were used to argue that she would not be a good, let alone effective and competent, Supreme Court Justice nominee.

These descriptions of Sotomayor are consistent with a clear double standard in how men and women are portrayed in the media and in American culture in general.

I actually wrote a lengthy paper on how women who employ what society deems as male characteristics when they hold leadership positions are constantly seen as first of all not credible, and second of all, not effective leaders.

Thanks to gender stereotype, males are supposed to be strong, competitive, aggressive, logical, powerful, and risk takers while women are supposed

There is this implicit agreement than women cannot be good leaders when they take on these masculine characteristics. When women go so far as to break the mold by taking on more masculine forms of communication, they are seen as deviant, different, and in essence wrong. When a female in a position of authority or power exercises communication traits normally associated with men, they are seen as domineering and controlling or even ineffective, which is not the stereotypical thought of how a woman “should act.”

“For Sotomayor, being a sharp interrogator and requiring lawyers to be ‘on top of it’ are negative qualities. These traits are not negative in most men, certainly not white men.”

“A persistent and ubiquitous gender stereotype portrays smart and aggressive women as domineering, mean, nasty bitches.”

One comparison that I particularly found interesting was when Sotomayor was compared to Justice Antonin Scalia:

“In Scalia, toughness is positive; in Sotomayor, it is nonjudicial. If Scalia asks irrelevant questions, he is just being a dutiful ‘law professor’ trying to hold the attention of his class. If Sotomayor does the same thing, she is just interested in hearing herself talk. When Scalia duels harshly with litigants, the ‘spectators’ watch in amazement. If Sotomayor asks tough questions, she is seen as difficult, temperamental, and excitable. The disparate treatment is too dense to deny.”