Rebecca Gill (Political Science) and her colleague Adam Feldman (Empirical SCOTUS) have published an article, "Power Dynamics in Supreme Court Oral Arguments: The Relationship between Gender and Justice-to-Justice Interruptions," in Justice System Journal. In this article, the authors examine how gendered norms of professional speech affect the ability of female Supreme Court justices to exercise power in oral argument. The results show that women are interrupted more than men, which compromises their ability to achieve their goals during these formal, high-stakes discussions. This inequity is compounded by the fact that interruptions of female justices by male justices are associated with lower word counts for the interrupted female justices in ways that interruptions by other women are not.
