I believe this is a misinterpretation of what RBG said. Here's her full quote:
“WHEN I’M SOMETIMES ASKED ‘WHEN WILL THERE BE ENOUGH [WOMEN ON THE SUPREME COURT]?’ AND I SAY ‘WHEN THERE ARE NINE,’ PEOPLE ARE SHOCKED. BUT THERE’D BEEN NINE MEN, AND NOBODY’S EVER RAISED A QUESTION ABOUT THAT.”
My reading of the quote is that is she's saying that a female justice should be not be any more surprising than a male justice, and thus that an all-female court should be no more surprising than an all-male court.
Just working out the probabilities, if women and men were selected as justices with equal probability, single-gendered courts should occur about 0.2% of the time for each gender.
That's a small number, but not a vanishingly small number. While I don't think we can say much about courts prior to ~1975 (equal gender opportunity to the court not yet being an objective), it seems reasonable to say going forward that IF we are achieving the stated goal of equal gender opportunity, we should expect that an all-female court will eventually occur.
Yes you have the interpretation right. She wasn't making a mission-statement, she was illustrating the faulty premise embedded in the question that there is some required count of women in the court that must be met in order to satisfy the feminists, as if the underrepresentation was something to ameliorate by imposing a quota rather than being indicative of a deeper general problem with how people think about equality.
“WHEN I’M SOMETIMES ASKED ‘WHEN WILL THERE BE ENOUGH [WOMEN ON THE SUPREME COURT]?’ AND I SAY ‘WHEN THERE ARE NINE,’ PEOPLE ARE SHOCKED. BUT THERE’D BEEN NINE MEN, AND NOBODY’S EVER RAISED A QUESTION ABOUT THAT.”
My reading of the quote is that is she's saying that a female justice should be not be any more surprising than a male justice, and thus that an all-female court should be no more surprising than an all-male court.
Just working out the probabilities, if women and men were selected as justices with equal probability, single-gendered courts should occur about 0.2% of the time for each gender.
That's a small number, but not a vanishingly small number. While I don't think we can say much about courts prior to ~1975 (equal gender opportunity to the court not yet being an objective), it seems reasonable to say going forward that IF we are achieving the stated goal of equal gender opportunity, we should expect that an all-female court will eventually occur.