Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon
Associate Dean and Professor of Political Science
College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University
Valerie Hoekstra, Alice J. Kang, and Mikki Caul Kittilson
Around the world the number of women participating on high courts has continued to increase. However, gains have been uneven with some (unexpected) countries filling the benches of the highest courts with women while others remain male dominated.
Yet most of these gains have taken place in the last two decades as prior to 2000 fewer than 10% of high court judges, on average, were female. This holds true regardless of whether we look at Constitutional Courts, the highest Court of Appeals (often referred to as Courts of Cassation), or to Supreme Courts. Not all countries structure their judicial system the same way. It is common in Civil Law systems to have one court that bears responsibility for determining the constitutionality of laws and acts while a separate court is the final court of appeal. In other cases, like the United States, a single body (which we refer to as a Supreme Court) is performs both functions.
In this figure you also see a line which increases steadily over time, this tracks the number of country-courts for which we were able to obtain information on the gender composition. For instance, we were only able to obtain good composition data for about 60 country-courts in 1970, but we have information on over 150 in 2014.
One of the most interesting things to emerge from our research is that women have made gains around the world, not only in the advanced industrial democracies. While Scandinavia, long renowned as progressive in the status of women, leads the world with an average of 33.9% of high court judges being female during the 2010-2014 period. Women also sit on high courts in other parts of the world.
As might be expected women’s participation on high courts lags in parts of the world that use religious law (e.g. the Middle East and North Africa). However, the gap is much smaller between Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa and the West than one might expect. This points to the important role played by the diffusion of global norms, something we explore in our forthcoming book.
You might be surprised to learn that the first woman to join a high court was appointed to the peak court of appeals in France in 1946! The first woman joined the highest courts in Poland (1948), Germany (1951) and Denmark (1953) shortly thereafter. But women were also shattering the glass ceiling quite early in unexpected places. Turkey appointed the first female high court judge in 1954 and Mexico in 1961, decades before Sandra Day O’Connor took her place on the United States Supreme Court.
We explored in a quantitative analysis the factors which determine when the first woman will be appointed to a high court. Among the things we identify as being the most important is a desire to emulate regional peers who have already appointed the first woman. There may be a positive effect as countries do not want to lag behind their neighbors in reaching important representational milestones. And that it is only in the OECD where selectors who might claim electoral advantage act to appoint the first woman early. Outside the OECD whether those who pick high court judges are elected or not has little effect.
Want to learn more? Check out two of our recent publications:
Escobar-Lemmon, Maria C.; Valerie Hoekstra, Alice J. Kang, and Miki Caul Kittilson. 2019. “Appointing women to high courts” in Research Handbook on Law and Courts, Susan M. Sterett and Lee Demetrius Walker, eds, Cheltenham, UK/Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Escobar-Lemmon, Maria C.; Valerie Hoekstra, Alice J. Kang, and Miki Caul Kittilson. forthcoming. “Breaking the Judicial Glass Ceiling” Journal of Politics.