Gender Diversity, Women’s Leadership, and Consensus in State Supreme Courts

Abstract

In this article, we argue that the leadership of women as chief justice or the majority opinion author, as well as an increased presence of women on the panel, should increase the likelihood of unanimous decisions and the size of majority coalitions in state supreme courts. Using an original dataset of cases in three policy areas from all state supreme courts from 1990–2015, we uncover some surprising results. In some issue areas, majority coalitions are larger when a woman serves as the majority opinion author, though we see smaller coalitions when more women are on the court and a man is assigned to write the majority opinion. Taken together, our results suggest that the role of gender diversity and women’s leadership in the opinion-writing process may be more complex than previously understood.