Why is it that a mans behavior is never scrutinized while women’s behavior is always under the microscope? This paradox has been true for men and women since the first equal rights amendments were passes. Currently, women in the political arena deal with this almost to a greater degree because they work in a higher gendered environment. A perfect example is Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer, whose nomination was highly questioned based on her behaviors and how they were inconsistent with male behavior, according to a Media Matters article
After her nomination her intelligence was questioned and debated on newspapers nationwide and became common practice. If a man would have been nominated, these types of insidious remarks about intelligence would have been unacceptable. For example, one journalist went out of his way to portray her in a negative light, which is not uncommon for a journalist, but refused to correct the facts after they were proved to be completely erroneous. The source, whose quote about Sotomayer’s intelligence was published in a slanderous manner, came forth and said that that he thought of her as actually quite smart. The newspaper never bothered to make the correction and the source never made a public statement about it. This caused other newspapers to follow suit and continue bashing on her intelligence based on the defamations on one article.
Her “temperament” was also debated because it was reported that she was a spit-fire who demanded lawyers to be on top of their fame and asked irrelevant questions to make sure they were listening. If these characteristics described a male’s behavior, his temperament would never be discussed. In fact he would be hailed at being a fair and dutiful judged with only the best interest it heart. Her behavior in regards to laziness was also discussed which could be a more racist stereotype about her Latina heritage but also an insult to her years of hard work, both graduating at the top of her class at Princeton and her hard work at climbing the ranks of the judicial latter.
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200905080032
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I agree that the "temperament" of Sotomayer was unnecessarily scrutinized by the media especially considering that many of the traits they viewed as negative for her would have been viewed as positive if she were a man. The media scrutiny only goes to show how ingrained the gendered stereotypes are in the field of law.
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