The effect of judges' gender on decisions regarding intimate-partner violence

Abstract

This article aims at disentangling the effect of judges’ gender, experience, and caseload in the assignment of restraining orders in IPV cases. Previous literature has independently looked at the effect of gender on judicial decisions and found that it becomes relevant in gender-related cases. However, we find that such effects are better understood in interaction with other contextual factors such as the experience of judges and the amount of work they face, because these determine the levels of uncertainty and information costs surrounding decisions. For our empirical analysis, we use data from on-duty pretrial court decisions on restraining orders in Spain between 2010 and 2018. We find conditional effects of gender depending on experience and workload: more experienced female judges are more likely to grant protection orders than their male counterparts when the amount of caseload is high. These findings are relevant to understand the mechanisms behind judicial inequality under civil law systems, where judges’ attributes tend to be unobservable by institutional design.