Women are "Better" Judges?

Dahlia Lithwick lays out a good argument in Slate. The part that made me think:

Reader Patrick St. John recently brought to my attention research that describes a phenomenon called "imaginative identification." The gist of it is that in order to get ahead in the world, you learn to see life through the eyes of those who have already succeeded. According to at least some anthropologists, women have had to get awfully good at understanding what it would be like to be a man. Men, on the other hand, are rarely forced to think about life in a woman's Manolos.
Anthropologist David Graeber makes this precise point, in an essay about women and imaginative identification. He argues, for instance, that women imagine life as a man every day of their lives. As he explains it:

A constant staple of 1950s situation comedies, in America, were jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes of course were always told by men. Women's logic was always being treated as alien and incomprehensible. One never had the impression, on the other hand, that women had much trouble understanding the men. That's because the women had no choice but to understand men.

Graeber continues:

Faced with the prospect of even trying to imagine a women's perspective, many recoil in horror. In the US, one popular trick among High School creative writing teachers is to assign students to write an essay imagining that they were to switch genders, and describe what it would be like to live for one day as a member of the opposite sex. The results are almost always exactly the same: all the girls in class write long and detailed essays demonstrating that they have spent a great deal of time thinking about such questions; roughly half the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Almost invariably they express profound resentment about having to imagine what it might be like to be a woman.

Now I am no social scientist, and this argument may be riddled with empirical holes. But it strikes me as intuitively obvious that in order to succeed in a white man's world, women must learn to see both sides in ways that men do not. If that is true, it just might make them "better" judges, at least in some circumstances. I don't know whether Judge Sotomayor was trying, albeit rather artlessly, to make some version of that argument in her speeches about the relative wisdom of Latina woman. But if I could ask her just one question at her confirmation hearing about that Berkeley speech, that would be it.