Christina Boyd, Lee Epstein, and Andrew Martin have been
awarded the ." Based on the numbers on the MPSA website, more than 3,300 papers were eligible for this award.
Here is the abstract:
We enter the debate over the role of sex in judging by
addressing the two predominant empirical questions it raises: whether male and
female judges decide cases distinctly (individual effects) and whether the
presence of a female judge on a panel causes her male colleagues to behave
differently (panel effects). We do not, however, rely exclusively on the
predominant statistical models – variants of standard regression analysis – to
address them. Because these tools alone are ill-suited to the task at hand, we
deploy a more appropriate methodology – non-parametric matching – which follows
from a formal framework for causal inference.
Applying matching methods to sex discrimination suits
resolved in the federal circuits between 1995 and 2002 yields two clear
results. First, we observe substantial individual effects: The likelihood of a
judge deciding in favor of the party alleging discrimination decreases by about
10 percentage points when the judge is a male. Likewise, we find that men are
significantly more likely to rule in favor of the rights litigant when a woman
serves on the panel. Both effects are so persistent and consistent that they
may come as a surprise even to those scholars who have long posited the
existence of gendered judging.
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