Raising the Bar: Women’s Appointments to High Courts Worldwide

• In Event: Race, Gender, and the Judiciary

Abstract

Diverse courts improve collective decision-making, strengthen public confidence in the judiciary and judicial decisions, and broaden access to the judicial process. One aspect of diversifying courts in recent decades has been an acceleration in women’s appointments. Our original data set on the number of women and men on up to 101 high courts from 1970 to 2013 reveals both striking success in appointing women, with some bodies attaining gender parity or near parity, and others making limited gains. Underneath the overall acceleration in women’s appointments in recent decades lies substantial variation among country-courts.
Our proposed paper for the APSA 2021 conference asks where and how women have made the largest strides on high courts? We examine cumulative appointments to high courts, considering three broad sets of explanation: pipelines to high courts, institutional context, and international influences. We test several hypotheses in multivariate models and find that court size and international factors correlate with higher levels of women’s representation. Our findings have implications for identifying what works to actualize gender equality on the benches of high courts.

Authors

• Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon, Texas A&M University

• Valerie J. Hoekstra, Arizona State University

• Alice Kang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Miki Caul Kittilson, Arizona State University