Gender Matters in the Judiciary

• In Event: Poster Session: Women and Politics Research

Abstract

Although the number of women entering law school and the legal profession has steadily increased, globally, women remain underrepresented in the courts. The results of judicial representation research posit that having more women judges enhances the democratic legitimacy of the judiciary and signals equal opportunity for women. When it comes to judicial outcomes, existing work, focused exclusively on Western countries, has found that female judges are more likely to vote in favor of the female plaintiffs in civil cases like sex-discrimination at workplace. However, criminal cases like sexual assault have received limited attention despite its gender-salient nature. This paper explores if and how the different gender compositions of panels influence the ways in which judges perceive sexual violence, apply laws to the crime, and reason for a sentence. Focusing on panel judges in Korean district courts, this study is particularly timely given the impact #MeToo has had on Korean society, where the #MeToo hashtags in Korean (#미투) ranked the third most tweeted language following English and Spanish. Through logistic regression analysis and semi-structured interviews of legal elites along with content analysis of judicial opinions, this paper renders results that all-female panels are more likely than all-male panels to convict the defendant in sexual assault cases in favor of the victim and use less frequently the sentence reasonings that pity or exonerate the defendant. Furthermore, the absence of a jury system in a civil law context enhances the presence of hierarchies among judges, producing unequal weight to each judge’s voice in the deliberative process. These results suggest a need to reform how three-judge-panels are currently assembled so as to ensure political and gender diversity on the bench and to render decisions that better respect and protect women’s dignity.

Author

• Seo Nyeong Jo, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities