Arbitration & Mediation

Update on Gender Diversity in the Judiciary and in ADR

By Victoria Pynchon

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.

Alabama
12.3%
Louisiana
20.2%
Ohio
23.1%
Alaska
16.7%
Maine
20.8%
Oklahoma
18.8%
Arizona
26.9%
Maryland
31.3%
Oregon
24.7%
Arkansas
13.9%
Massachusetts
34.2%
Pennsylvania
27.2%
California
28.2%
Michigan
17.2%
Rhode Island
7.4%
29.6%
Colorado
26.8%
Minnesota
26.2%
South Carolina
13.3%
Connecticut
27.9%
Mississippi
15.7%
South Dakota
20.5%
Delaware
17.2%
Missouri
10.2%
Tennessee
18.5%
Florida
33.5%
Montana
22.0%
Texas
29.8%
Georgia
16.8%
Nebraska
13.2%
Utah
17.1%
Hawaii
34.9%
Nevada
32.4%
Vermont
31.8%
Idaho
14.6%
New Hampshire
25.9%
Virginia
9.7%
Illinois
22.3%
New Jersey
25.0%
Washington
28.6%
Indiana
15.7%
New Mexico
17.2%
West Virginia
5.6%
Iowa
13.6%
New York
20.0%
Wisconsin
15.9%
Kansas
8.2%
North Carolina
16.2%
Wyoming
19.2%
Kentucky
27.5%
North Dakota
21.3%

Prescriptions for change in my next post.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on March 04, 2010 (boomark / email).