There’s a lot to be said against her latest bit of anti-conservative snark—for example, she never quite explains what’s wrong with the claim that Roberts’s comment about lawyers and housewives was an anti-lawyer joke, not an anti-housewife one. But this passage was especially odd: “Another memo has Roberts blasting the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, dismissing it as an attempt to ‘bridge the purported “gender gap.”‘ In a later memo, Roberts referenced a proposal from a Reagan supporter for elevating Sandra Day O’Connor to chief justice and appointing a second woman to replace her if Warren Burger retired—and ‘Presto! The gender gap vanishes.’ Roberts’ response: ‘Any appointments the president makes will not be based on such crass considerations,’ Roberts added. ‘The president’s strong record on women’s issues—as it becomes more widely known—should suffice to close the “gender gap.”’
“Oddly enough, even Sandra Day O’Connor isn’t above such crassness. But then she lived through the ‘purported’ gender gap in a way Roberts did not.”
The phrase “gender gap” has most frequently been employed to describe the tendency of women to vote Democratic at higher rates than men (or, sometimes, just their tendency to vote Democratic). That seems to be pretty clearly the way Roberts was using the phrase. His use of “purported” could have several meanings: Given that the pattern was only beginning to be emerged and noticed, it’s hardly odd that he should have used it. But whatever he meant by “purported,” if Roberts was using “gender gap” in the standard way then Lithwick’s comment about O’Connor makes no sense. Did O’Connor live through the 1980 election in a way Roberts did not?