Since judges wear robes, can the debate over the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor be about qualifications and issues rather than about pantsuits or bared arms?

We all know that women walk impossible tightropes in wardrobe selection. Christina Binkley of The Wall Street Journal reported on the dilemma for women in finance:

It’s a measure of the tremendous scrutiny that hedge-fund women face that they can’t confidently imitate the men’s “power casual” style. “You’re neither here nor there,” says Kay Garkusha, who worked at a small Connecticut hedge fund until December. “You can’t dress like the guys and you can’t dress like the other women in support roles.”

Similarly, John Schwartz of The New York Times reported on the dilemma for lawyers:

Judge [Joan] Lefkow said some women should dress more appropriately in court… one lawyer had shown up for a jury trial in a velour outfit that looked for all the world as if she were “on her way home from the gym.” …Judge Michael P. McCuskey…said that at moot court competitions in law schools, he had seen participants wearing “skirts so short that there’s no way they can sit down, and blouses so short there’s no way the judge wouldn’t look.”

Susan J. Koniak, a law professor at Boston University, suggested one solution to the Times:

If clothing in court is such a distraction, she said, “we should just have a bag when we walk in, a burqa.”

I assume Koniak was being sarcastic, but the solution of wearing baggy cover-up clothing is very real and painful for Noel, an undergraduate chemistry major who wrote on the Chemistry Blog:

My mother always nags at me for wearing the same darn thing every day: hooded sweater, t-shirt, acid-burned jeans and flip flops…I wasn’t like this in high school. I was put-together, moderately sociable, generally happy… Those days are long gone now… My first day in freshman chemistry lab wasn’t what I’d imagined it to be. It gave me some sad preview on breaking into this community as a female student: the condescending way my male classmates talked to me, the way they hogged all the work in a collaborative procedure because “you don’t know what you’re doing…” Now don’t even get me started on the number of times I get hit on by my graduate instructors during class and the many “hey, my face is UP HERE” moments during academic discussions…

So please, stop acting like a sleazy pig. Because of the things you say and do, I feel obligated to look frumpy and completely covered up. I feel self-conscious for looking and acting feminine. I even feel a little inadequate on performing tasks that I am perfectly capable of doing. It’s the type of workplace discrimination that nobody would ever acknowledge or address.

The potato-sack theory of dressing brings us back to the subject of robes. Do women in robes escape wardrobe scrutiny? Apparently not. Because, you see, there’s still the topic of footwear.

Blogger Isis the Scientist, who describes herself as a physiologist at a major research university, writes about a post by Professor Anonymous, who describes himself as a science department faculty member. Isis quotes the Professor Anonymous blog entry “Pumps and Circumstance” – since replaced by an apology — regarding women dressed in academic regalia (caps & gowns etc.) at graduation:

Professor Anonymous: I also noticed that ladies’ heel height is inversely related to status:
Undergraduate = 4 inches
Graduate = flats or loafers
Faculty = sandals or sneakers
Commenter JH: I heard that high heels were good at causing corns, calluses, hammertoes…
Professor Anonymous: And in some cases, pregnancy.

Isis responded:

I feel sad for these women, wanting to dress up and celebrate what for most of them will be their last graduation day with their family and friends… not knowing the distain Professor Anonymous feels for them. Not knowing that, as he sits in his robe, stroking the velvet stripes on his sleeve because he can’t reach down and stroke his [*], they are nothing more to him than an object of one creepy professor’s patriarchal [*]need.

Rev. Nicole Lamarche, photo by John Bohn

Yet it’s not only men having trouble looking past wardrobe. Silvia Spring of the Boston Globe recently profiled a female pastor. Spring did describe the pastor’s high-heeled boots in the opening paragraph, but apparently, there wasn’t enough spice to the robe and stole that the pastor currently wears in church. So Spring focused the article on the fact that the pastor is a former beauty queen. The headline blared: “From swimsuit competition glamour to parish pulpit clamor,”and in case the reader didn’t get the visual on the first pass, the story used the word “swimsuit” six additional times, as well as the words “butt”, “legs” and “cellulite”. Will someone show me, please, a profile of a male pastor that contains the words “butt” and “cellulite”?

Please, nation, as we debate the merits of Sotomayor’s confirmation, can we leave her body and clothing under the robe?