Ash, Elliott, Chen, Daniel L. and Ornaghi, Arianna (2024) Gender attitudes in the judiciary: evidence from U.S. circuit courts. American Economic Journal : Applied Economics, vol. 16 (n° 1). pp. 314-350.

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Abstract

Do gender attitudes influence interactions with female judges in U.S. Circuit Courts? In this paper, we propose a judge-specific measure of gender attitudes based on use of gender-stereotyped language in the judge’s authored opinions. Exploiting quasi-random assignment of judges to cases and conditioning on judges’ characteristics, we validate the measure showing that higher-slant judges vote more conservatively in gender-related cases. Higher-slant judges interact differently with female colleagues: they are more likely to reverse lower-court decisions if the lower-court judge is a woman than a man, are less likely to assign opinions to female judges, and cite fewer female-authored opinions.