I think it is in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers that he suggests that after you meet minimum requirements, there is not necessarily any benefit to being more qualified. This would apply to the women judges. If they are qualified enough, it doesn't matter whether someone else is nominally more qualified. For any job, you don't need to pick the "most qualified" person. You only need to pick someone who is sufficiently qualified.

People obviously applied this standard to Barack Obama. No one could reasonably think that Pres. Obama was more qualified than John McCain (even Obama wouldn't have said that). However, people decided that he was qualified enough, even if he wasn't the most qualified.

It would be nice if we could replace affirmative action with reasonable minimum standards of qualification and then randomly pick from the pool of qualified people, rather than trying to find the "most qualified".