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Home > News & Events > Events Calendar > Like Daughter, Like Judge: How Having Daughters Affects Judges’ Voting on Women’s Issues
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emailThursday, February 9, 2012
Like Daughter, Like Judge: How Having Daughters Affects Judges’ Voting on Women’s Issues
Maya Sen, Doctoral Candidate, Harvard Department of
Government
Social scientists have long maintained that women judges might
behave differently than their male colleagues (e.g., Boyd et al.
2010). This is particularly true when it comes to highly charged
social issues such as gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and
the status of gender as a suspect classification under federal law.
Less studied has been the role that a judge's family might have on
judicial decision making. For example, we may think that a male
judge with daughters might have different views of sex
discrimination and harassment than a male judge without daughters.
This paper explores this question by leveraging the natural
experiment of a child's gender -- conditional on having a child,
the sex of the child is randomly assigned (Washington 2008).
Looking at data from the U.S. Court of Appeals, we find that having
daughters is as predictive of how a judge will vote on gender
issues as well as partisanship. We further find that, conditional
on the number of children, judges with daughters consistently vote
in a more liberal fashion on gender issues than judges without
daughters. This effect is robust and persists even once we control
for a wide variety of factors, including partisanship. Our results
more broadly suggest that personal experiences -- as distinct from
partisanship -- may influence how elite actors make decisions, but
only in the context of substantively related areas.
- Location:WAPPP Cason Seminar Room, T-102
- Date:Thursday, February 9, 2012
-
Time:11:40 AM
