Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women's Issues?

TLDR

The study investigates whether a judge’s personal relationships, specifically having daughters, influence their rulings by using the child’s gender as a natural experiment. The authors use the child’s gender as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of having daughters on judges’ votes. The study finds that, controlling for the number of children, judges with daughters vote more feminist on gender issues, a result robust to tests and largely driven by Republican judges, indicating that personal experiences and empathy shape judicial decisions.

Abstract

In this article, we consider whether personal relationships can affect the way that judges decide cases. To do so, we leverage the natural experiment of a child's gender to identify the effect of having daughters on the votes of judges. Using new data on the family lives of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges, we find that, conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more feminist fashion on gender issues than judges who have only sons. This result survives a number of robustness tests and appears to be driven primarily by Republican judges. More broadly, this result demonstrates that personal experiences influence how judges make decisions, and this is the first article to show that empathy may indeed be a component in how judges decide cases.