Helpful Insight

Kerber doesn’t just regurgitate data.  Her insightful analysis gives depth of meaning to the data.  The following provides a good example.  She indicates how the inconsistencies in arguments both for and against women in juries (both sides alternating between the genders’ difference and sameness) reveals the culture’s ambivalence on the issue.

“Everywhere the case for women jurors seesawed back and forth between an emphasis on women’s and men’s sameness…and an emphasis on women’s and men’s difference…The case against women jurors also seesawed back and forth…The images alternated, often in the same memo, sometimes in the same paragraph, their internal contradictions and oxymoronic nature reflecting deep cultural ambivalence.”