Stereotypes in High Stake Decisions: Evidence from U.S. Circuit Courts

Résumé

Attitudes towards social groups such as women and racial minorities have been shown to be important determinants of individual’s decisions but are hard to measure for those in policymaking roles. We propose a way to address the challenge in the case of U.S. appellate court judges, for whom we have large corpora of written text (their published opinions). Using the universe of published opinions in U.S. Circuit Courts 1890-2013, we construct a judge-specific measure of gender-stereotyped language (gender slant) by looking at the relative co-occurrence of words identifying gender (male versus female) and words identifying gender stereotypes (career versus family). We find that female and younger judges tend to use less stereotyped language in their opinions. Our measure of gender slant matters for judicial decisions: judges with higher slant vote more conservatively on women rights’ issues. In addition, lexically slanted judges influence workplace outcomes for female judges: more slanted judges are less likely to assign opinions to female judges, cite fewer female-authored opinions and are more likely to reverse lower-court decisions if the district court judge is a woman. Our results expose a possible use of lexical slant to detect decision-makers’ stereotypes that predict behavior and disparate outcomes.