Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging

TLDR

The study examines how sex influences judicial decisions, focusing on individual effects of male versus female judges and panel effects when men serve alongside female judges, while noting prevailing theoretical explanations. The authors aim to investigate whether male and female judges differ in their individual decision‑making and whether male judges’ behavior changes when serving on panels with female judges. The study uses semiparametric matching, grounded in causal inference theory, to assess gender effects. The matching analysis revealed that gender effects appear only in sex‑discrimination cases, with male judges 10 percentage points less likely to rule for the discrimination plaintiff and men more likely to rule for the rights litigant when a woman sits on the panel, supporting an informational account of gendered judging.

Abstract

We explore the role of sex in judging by addressing two questions of long‐standing interest to political scientists: whether and in what ways male and female judges decide cases distinctly—“individual effects”—and whether and in what ways serving with a female judge causes males to behave differently—“panel effects.” While we attend to the dominant theoretical accounts of why we might expect to observe either or both effects, we do not use the predominant statistical tools to assess them. Instead, we deploy a more appropriate methodology: semiparametric matching, which follows from a formal framework for causal inference. Applying matching methods to 13 areas of law, we observe consistent gender effects in only one—sex discrimination. For these disputes, the probability of a judge deciding in favor of the party alleging discrimination decreases by about 10 percentage points when the judge is a male. Likewise, when a woman serves on a panel with men, the men are significantly more likely to rule in favor of the rights litigant. These results are consistent with an informational account of gendered judging and are inconsistent with several others.