women filled 26.3% of the judgeships on state courts of last resort, 19.2% of federal district court judgeships, 20.1% of federal appellate judgeships, and as of 2018, 33.3% of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. She received unanimous Senate approval. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, commenting on women pursuing careers, observed that "women professionals still have primary responsibility for the children and the housekeeping, spending roughly twice as much time on these cares as do their professional husbands." In 1992, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit convened the first federal all-female three-judge panel, composed of Sixth Circuit judges Alice M. Batchelder and Cornelia Groefsema Kennedy, alongside the Eastern District of Michigan's Anna Diggs Taylor, sitting by designation. Gender bias and barriers to entry in the US courts In the 1980s and 1990s, women began to experience an increase in their access the courts, as employees, judges, and court-users. This increase in access, along with a renewed interest in uncovering underlying discrimination, led many courts to consider the experience that women were having in the traditionally male-dominated court system. In the early 1980s the National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund and the National Association of Women Judges banded together to push the state and federal courts to review a perceived bias against women that they believed existed in the courts. From 1982 to 1984, the New Jersey Supreme Court created and ran the nation's first official Task Force on Women in the Courts to "investigate the extent to which gender bias exists in the New Jersey judicial branch, and to develop an education program to eliminate any such bias". The task force found "significant gender bias," prompting the New Jersey Chief Justice to order the task force to continue its work indefinitely. The New Jersey report garnered significant public attention and prompted other states to consider similar studies in their own judicial branches. At a 1988 joint meeting of the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators the participants formulated resolutions directing each chief justice to create a task force in his or her jurisdiction to study "gender bias and minority concerns". This effort resulted in a comprehensive overview of issues impacting women in the various state judiciaries. Starting in 1992 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for