Race trumps gender? Women, African Americans, and the Senate Confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas

In this article the authors examine with greater precision the impacts of various constituencies in the struggle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Using multivariate logistical regression models, they challenge the conventional interpretation that racial constituency concerns “trumped” gender constituency concerns in the voting decisions of senators. Rather, their findings indicate that senators from states with more professionalized female workforces were more, not less, likely to vote in favor of Thomas’s confirmation. In a concluding section, they provide an explanation for these findings and discuss their implications.