Our project’s goal was to explain change and stability in the demographic characteristics of judges on high courts around the world. The demographic profile of who sits on high courts may influence public perceptions of the fairness of governing institutions and shape public confidence in the judiciary. The broad questions here are who administers justice? Why are certain groups represented and others less so?

To understand change and stasis in who sits on high courts, we examined the inclusion of women on a country’s peak appellate, constitutional, and supreme courts. The demographics of law school graduates have changed dramatically in recent decades, with more women entering the legal profession than ever before. Yet, high courts have not followed suit. Our project analyzed why more women have been appointed to high courts in some countries and at some points in time than others.

The award allowed us to systematically investigate gender demographics on high courts across the globe. A major outcome was the creation of the world’s first dataset to track women’s and men’s appointments to high courts over time and across countries. The dataset includes peak national courts (appellate, constitutional, and supreme) from 1970 to 2014 in up to 170 countries. The United States, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, United Nations, and World Bank have pledged to support judicial reform and gender equality, but they have lacked global demographic data on high courts. We have created a website, http://highcourtsandgender.net, where we plan to post the data (so it can be downloaded without cost) as well as some summary reports on the data. The raw data will be valuable for practitioners and scholars seeking to identify factors that promote demographic diversity on high courts.

Our second significant contribution is to existing knowledge about the international diffusion of norms of equality. Our central hypothesis was that the spread of new expectations of gender equality can increase the number of women appointed to high courts. Norms, furthermore, may diffuse in multiple ways. Ideas may spread through international treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the behavior of neighboring countries, and incentives from international donors to modernize or diversify the judicial branch.

In our global quantitative analyses, we found preliminary evidence that the more years that have passed since a country ratified CEDAW and the higher the average percentage of women on high courts in the region, the lower the probability a high court will have no women. We further found that the number of years since a country ratified CEDAW and the regional average percentage of women on high courts are associated with a higher percentage of women on high courts. This suggests that treaties (such as CEDAW) and the example of neighbors carry ideas across national borders. By contrast, in our data, measures of incentives did not appear to influence the inclusion of women on high courts. Even when we consider existing explanations and account for the country’s level of wealth, type of legal system, and status of women, the spread of international norms appears to matter for gender equality on high courts. We have already communicated these findings to the scholarly community through conference presentations.

In the process of generating these outcomes, we have educated and trained numerous undergraduate and graduate students in the social sciences and law in Arizona, Nebraska, and Texas. Students developed research skills in data collection and management and realized the value of their foreign language proficiency in Arabic, Czech, French, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish. Using our data, future students from the high school to the graduate level will be able to pose and answer scientific questions about where and when the demographics of high courts change.

In conclusion, our outcomes include a global dataset that will be used by researchers, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and students and academic manuscripts presenting both global patterns and case studies of women’s pathways to the bench in five countries. Our project advances the world’s understanding of the conditions under which the demographics of high courts reflect the broader population, which may be key in improving public perceptions of fairness and legitimacy in the judiciary.

Last Modified: 11/29/2017
Modified by: Alice Kang