During the recent Judicial Committee election process, third-formers expressed both surprise and dismay at the thought of sitting through 21 campaign speeches. Yet, the popularity of the position is to be expected. The Judicial Committee is unique to Choate, and its role of reviewing honor code infractions and recommending courses of disciplinary action to the faculty is crucial.
In the Judicial Committee, two student representatives of the third and fourth forms are elected; several more are chosen for the fifth. The students who become a part of this committee are those who the student body feels will best represent it. With the implementation of approval voting — a system where a student votes for as many candidates as she likes — all voices are heard.
However, a truly unanticipated aspect of the third-form elections was the severely unbalanced gender ratio. The fact that 15 of 21 students — more than two-thirds of the candidates — were female proved to be a major concern and point of discussion.
It is interesting because a prerequisite of the voting system is that the two representatives of the rising fourth and fifth forms must always be of different genders. Given such an imbalance in the number of females and males running for a JC position, it certainly appears that female candidates are disadvantaged.
Must gender really play a role in student representation? Or are we, in a sense, denying the voices of our student community by forcing the roles to always be that of one girl and one boy? These rules are stipulations on how our representatives are elected and, by extension, what student leadership groups look like.
While some may argue that certain aspects of student life may be overlooked if both genders are not explicitly represented in each form, it is important to consider what the Judicial Committee, in particular, is meant to do for the school. When it comes to objective judgement of honor code violations at Choate, the gender of a JC representative is irrelevant. One’s gender does not qualify her or him to have a more unique perspective; it doesn’t mean that she or he will bring anything more to the table.
Certainly, if elected representatives just happened to be of different genders, this wouldn’t be a problem. However, in other situations, the School’s push for “diversity” and the student body’s actual preferences could very well be in opposition.
All of this, however, is not to say that the newly elected Judicial Committee representatives — both male and female — won’t be wonderful in their appointed positions. I certainly expect that they will be. It is simply our current voting process that prompts us to question our priorities as a School and how we really should be electing representatives.
