A Preliminary Analysis
Several stories have been written in the last month about the 2013 Las Vegas Review-Journal Judging the Judges survey. The overall results can be found here, and a short summaries have been written by Carri Geer Thevenot and Jane Ann Morrison. My own piece calls attention to the gender gap in these survey scores, which continues a troubling pattern with Judicial Performance Evaluations across the country.
Below, I provide a supplement to my piece in the LVRJ. Table 1 provides some summary information about the results of the survey. While much of the information is derived from the Judging the Judges survey results, I have supplemented these data with additional publicly-available information about the judges.
Table 1
This table presents a breakdown of the judges by a number of different criteria. For each subgrouping, I’ve provided the average “retention score” for the group. This retention score is simply the percentage of attorneys who recommend retention of the judge. The table shows that the vast majority–76%–of our county’s judges are white. However, there is near gender parity on the bench; 53% of judges are male, and 47% are female. The last column, however, shows the gender gap in retention scores. This gap is statistically significant (t=2.77, df=86, p>.003).
I’ve included a number of other measures here, too. The presence of a gender gap is not enough to implicate gender bias in the surveys. Instead, we need to hold constant whatever additional measures related to judicial quality we can obtain. I’ve done this in a multivariate model, the results of which are found in Table 2.
Table 2
Table 2 shows that the gender gap remains even after we control for the judge’s experience, the prestige of her law school education, and other variables related to judicial quality. This is in keeping with my previous research, as Professor Sylvia Lazos detailed here. In 2014, Clark County’s female judges scored about points lower than did their similarly-situated male counterparts. This finding is robust to a number of different model specifications, and has held consistently in Judging the Judges surveys since at least 1998.
I’ve also added the 2013 data to the information from the past. The results of this analysis can be found in Table 3.
Table 3
Here, we can see that the gender gap across this time period is about 11 points. Newspaper scandals bring scores down significantly, but the remainder of the predictor variables are insignificant predictors of retention scores. This model also highlights a race gap, which is more difficult to capture statistically due to the limited number of non-white judges on the bench in Clark County.
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