SOL student Amelia Steinbach, Trinity ’21, published an op-ed in the Washington Post about her summer research.
Steinbach used her SOL funding to work in the Washington, D.C. office of Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawai’i, where she studied the the lack of diversity among the Senate Judiciary Committee’s expert witnesses. The project involved both quantitative measures of panelist diversity and qualitative interviews with committee staff to determine the causes of the lack of diversity.
“According to my tally, during the first seven months of the 116th Congress, nearly 70 percent of expert witnesses who appeared before the Judiciary Committee were white men,” she wrote in the piece. “About a quarter of the witnesses were women, and roughly 6 percent were nonwhite. Out of 145 witnesses from January to July, only four were women of color.”
Although she identified a number of explanations for the problem, Steinbach emphasized that one of the greatest issues is that staff focus on diversity only when it comes to certain topics. A hearing on abortion might include women, for instance, but staff might not try as hard to find a woman panelist for a hearing on competition.
Through her research, Steinbach urged committee staff to pay more attention to who they are selecting as witnesses.
“Given that they serve all Americans, making sure expert-witness panels represent diverse perspectives ought to be an important goal for senators and their staffs,” she wrote. “Sending invitations to people outside the usual circles of white men just isn’t that difficult.”