Rebecca Gill (Political Science and the Women's Research Institute of Nevada) and Michael Kagan (Law), along with Fatma Marouf of Texas A&M University School of Law, recently published an article, "The Impact of Maleness on Judicial Decision Making: Masculinity, Chivalry, and Immigration Appeals," in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities. In this article, the authors explore the effects of judge and litigant gender on decision making in immigration appeals before the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Substantively, the authors find that immigrant litigants fare differently in front of all-male versus mixed-gender panels, but these differences are contingent upon the gender of the litigant. Although most research on gender and judging focuses on the things that make female judges different, this article finds evidence that theories of masculinity explain part of this difference as well. This article is critical of the tendency to study traditionally underrepresented groups in terms of their differences from white males, who are generally the unexamined baseline group. Instead, the authors argue that cognitive biases derived from socialization and learned stereotypes can impact the behavior of men as well. For access to the full article, please contact Rebecca Gill at rebecca.gill@unlv.edu.
