Sen on "How Having Daughters Affect Judges' Voting" 

 We hope that you can join us for the first  Applied Statistics Workshop 
of the term this Wednesday, January 26th when we will be happy to have
 Maya Sen  from the Department of Government. She will be presenting
joint work with  Adam Glynn , also in the Department of Government. You
will find an abstract below. As always, we will serve a light lunch
and the talk will begin around 12:15p. (Note that this talk is not on
the website schedule yet due to technical issues.) 

 &#8220;Female Socialization: How Having Daughters Affect Judges&#8217; Voting on
Women&#8217;s Issues&#8221; (with Adam Glynn)  
Maya Sen  
Department of Government  
CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.  map )  
Wednesday, January 26th 12 noon   

 Abstract: 

 
   Social scientists have long maintained that women judges might behave
  different than their male colleagues (e.g., Boyd et al. (2010)). This
  is particularly true when it comes to highly charged social issues
  such as gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and the status of
  gender as a suspect classification under federal law. Less studied has
  been the role that a judge&#8217;s family might have on judicial decision
  making.  For example, we may think that a male judge with daughters
  might have different views of gender discrimination and sexual
  harassment than a male judge without any daughters. This paper takes a
  look at the question causally by leveraging the hypothesis that,
  conditional on the number of total number of children, the probability
  of a judge having a boy or a girl is independent of any covariates
  (Washington 2008).  Looking at data from the U.S. Courts of Appeals,
  we find that conditional on the number of children, judges with
  daughters consistently vote in a more liberal fashion on gender
  issues than judges without daughters. This effect is particularly
  strong among Republican appointed judges and is robust and persists
  even once we control for a wide variety of factors. Our results more
  broadly suggest that personal experiences &#8212; as distinct from
  partisanship &#8212; may influence how elite actors make decisions, but
  only in the context of substantively salient issues. 
 

  UPDATE (1/25/11):  Correct a typo in the abstract. Judges become more liberal on gender issues with daughters, not more conservative.