Judges with daughters predisposed towards women's issues?

Judges with daughters consistently vote in a more feminist fashion on gender issues than judges who have only sons, says a study, adding that the effect appears to be driven primarily by Republican judges in the US.

Using new data on the family lives of US Courts of Appeals judges, the team, including an Indian-origin researcher, found that conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently rule for women's issues.

The findings were based on data on the families of 224 judges presiding over the US Courts of Appeals as well as nearly 1,000 gender-related cases decided by these judges.

"This result survives a number of robustness tests and appears to be driven primarily by Republican judges," said study co-author Maya Sen from the University of Rochester in Britain.

"Although no literature within judicial politics has explored the issue, public opinion scholarship provides some evidence. Most of this literature suggests that having daughters leads individuals to have more liberal political and social positions than those who have sons," the authors wrote.

More broadly, this result demonstrates that personal experiences influence how judges make decisions.

"Our results clearly demonstrate a liberalising effect of having daughters among judges voting in gender-related cases," said Adam N. Glynn from Harvard University.

How the effect works, however, is less clear.

This is the first article to show that empathy may indeed be a component in how judges decide cases, researchers concluded.

The study appeared in the American Journal of Political Science.