Trial “Better than Men”: Gender Variation in Courts of China

• In Event: Race, Gender, and the Judiciary

Abstract

Being numerically underrepresented and substantially powerless at most government levels, women must act and present themselves differently in different contexts to overcome the implicit gendered biases and show their competence in jobs. They often conform to a normative masculine style in legislatures (Kathlene, 1994; Pearson and Dancey, 2011, Karpowitz and Mendelberg, 2014) and political campaigns (Anderson and Klofstad, 2015, 2016; Bauer, 2017; Cassese and Holman, 2018). In the judicial system, studies on written decisions show mixed results. Although the masculine norms of behaviors (cool, professional, and unemotional) are valued in the legal profession (Shane et al., 2018), the gender stereotypes are not uniformly applied to female judges in their arguments (Nelson, 2016; Fix and Johnson, 2017) How does gender stereotype affect women in a political system without election pressures? We argue the social identity theory, with slight revisions, still upholds in the context of the Chinese judicial system. Informed by a recent study of vocal pitch (Dietrich et al., 2019), we apply an innovative machine-learning algorithm to an original audio dataset of 1,400 criminal trials, identifying the cues of Mandarin proficiency and subconscious emotion fluctuations (such as vocal pitch and pause) of judges. Our analysis of the audio data and corresponding sentencing decisions support the argument that female judges tend to be “colder” and more formal.

This paper studies how gender stereotype affects political communication in China. By applying a machine-learning algorithm to the audios of 1,400 criminal trials, we find female judges tend to be “colder” and more formal.

Authors

• Erico Yu, University of Iowa

• Yuehong Tai, University of Iowa