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Trailblazers and Those That Followed: Personal Experiences, Gender, and Judicial Empathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Laura P. Moyer  and
Susan B. Haire
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Abstract

This article investigates one causal mechanism that may explain why female judges on the federal appellate courts are more likely than men to side with plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases. To test whether personal experiences with inequality are related to empathetic responses to the claims of female plaintiffs, we focus on the first wave of female judges, who attended law school during a time of severe gender inequality. We find that female judges are more likely than their male colleagues to support plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases, but that this difference is seen only in judges who graduated law school between 1954 and 1975 and disappears when more recent law school cohorts of men and women judges are compared. These results suggest that the effect of gender as a trait is tied to the role of formative experiences with discrimination.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 665 - 689
Copyright
© 2015 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank Barry Edwards, Susan Johnson and the other panelists at the 2014 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, and finally the anonymous reviewers and editors for their helpful comments and criticisms on early versions of this paper. Any errors that remain are the authors’ own.

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