Gênero e comportamento judicial no Supremo Tribunal Federal: os ministros confiam menos em relatoras mulheres?

Abstract

Supreme Courts are generally portrayed as institutions particularly well-positioned to defend and promote rights of minorities, including gender rights. However, gender discrimination often occurs within these institutions. Although existing empirical studies have largely focused on how the gender of the judge affects his or her decisions on the merits of the case, gender hierarchy and gender stereotypes can have an impact in other aspects of Court’s operation, such as in how judges relate to one another during deliberations. The paper aims to explore two facets of this phenomenon by looking at gendered relations in the Brazilian Supreme Court decision-making process. By examining a database containing all the court rulings debates between 2001 and 2013, we analyze the impact of gender in two key dimension of judicial behavior in a collegiate setting. More specifically, we test whether the gender of their colleagues affect how Brazilian Supreme Court Justices behaves when it comes to (i) dissenting from the case reporter’s opinion; and (ii) asking for deliberations to be suspended, after the case reporter has spoken, in order to further study the arguments and case files. In both dimensions, we expect the justices’ confidence in the reporter’s or the dissenter’s knowledge or authority on the issues being discussed plays an important role, which makes them relevant to understanding the role of gender stereotypes. Our preliminary results point to gender biases in the Justices’ attitudes towards female case reporters and female dissenters in at least one of these dimensions: when the case reporter is female, the other Justices are more likely to dissent. We interpret these results as suggesting that gender stereotypes – for example, that women are less competent or reliable, and/or less likely or less able to retaliate – might help us understand decision-making in the STF and in Brazilian courts more generally.