Women’s Appointment to High Courts around the World: Gendered Pipelines?

One of the great transformations in politics over the last century has been the increasing presence of women in positions of power. Past research identifies pipelines to women’s legislative representation. Our study takes a step to examining to what extent existing findings about gendered pipelines can be generalized to other branches of government. Our paper examines an oft-asserted claim that the number of women on constitutional courts and supreme courts is linked to the supply of women judges and lawyers. Some scholars and activists contend that gendered expectations and discrimination discourage or prevent women from pursuing legal careers that may springboard into judgeship. Others argue that the problem of decreasing or stagnating numbers of women on high courts is with the appointers who overlook qualified women in favor of men. It may be that both factors help explain patterns in women’s presence on high courts. Using fine-grained evidence collected through archival research and interviews for four countries where we conducted fieldwork (Canada, Colombia, Ireland, and South Africa, funded by the National Science Foundation) and the U.S., we examine whether and how the supply of women judges and lawyers is connected to the appointment of women to high courts. One proposition is that there is a direct relationship between the proportion of women in pipeline careers and the proportion of women on high courts. A second, more nuanced proposition is that there is a time component to pipeline explanations. We expect the proportion of women in pipeline careers to correlate with the proportion of women on high courts in earlier years in each country, when there may have been no or few women lawyers and judges, but not in more recent years.