Update On Gender Diversity In The Judiciary And In ADR

From Settle It Now Negotiation Blog

When I posted Negotiating Gender:  Why So Few Women Neutrals? I had not yet found a source for the statistical representation of women neutrals on the American Arbitration Association Panel.  I’ve now located an article on the AAA website from December 18, 2006  (here) stating that women then made up 13% of AAA’s national roster of neutrals. 

As I noted in that post, diversity among private neutrals is extremely important as more and more litigation is being diverted to arbitration, particularly employment litigation in which allegations of gender discrimination are not (I believe) uncommon (I have no statistics on this either and ask that anyone who does to please send them along). 

Neither the public nor the private justice systems can deliver procedural justice in the absence of hearing officers that fairly represent the people and business entities being judged. As of May 2009, 212 full-time federal judges were women, more than a quarter of the federal judiciary.

The state judiciary is more representative of the population on which it sits in judgment.  Nearly a third of all state supreme court justices are women and in 22 out of 53 supreme courts, women make up at least 40% of the bench.   

The state and federal court figures above are all from a 2009 article, Diversity on the Bench (here).Gender diversity in the state trial courts also appears to hover around 20-30% female as revealed by a recent study on Racial and Gender Diversity in State Courts with outliers in the States you’d expect. A list of all 50 states after the jump.

                       

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