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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   27041 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Does anyone have any statistics on the gender composition of juries, particularly in the United States?

I got curious about the question because at some point, I Noticed that in basically every high-profile court case I've paid attention to (which is, granted, not very many), every juror that was ever interviewed or reported upon was a woman. I also have a vague feeling that I've heard the phrases "all-female jury" or "all-woman jury" enough times for them to sound familiar, whereas the male equivalents sound totally alien to me. As a sanity check, I went and looked up the jury composition of some famous criminal trials, and it seemed to agree with my hunch (George Zimmerman's trial had 6 women and 0 men, and Derek Chauvin's trial had 8 women and 4 men). It seems plausible that women would be more likely to end up on juries for a variety of reasons, but it also seems plausible that I'm imagining everything.

When I went about trying to research the topic, the vast majority of jury demographic information out there seemed to be on race. The raw numbers are readily available (for example, here's a breakdown of jurors by race in Massachusetts for 2024 Q1 -- it seems basically proportional to the general population if you account for things like age). There are also commentaries abound about how important racial representation is for equal justice. One of the first Google search results for "juries by demographics" is this lengthy piece titled Race and the Jury, which is your standard mainstream race piece about how black people (and occasionally Hispanic people) are discriminated against in jury selection. Whether it makes a compelling argument is up to the reader, but the point is that these kinds of pieces exist in abundance and that the racial composition of juries is something that people care about. Given how racially charged the issue of policing (or "crime" depending on your viewpoint) is, this makes some amount of sense.

However, when I went to find statistics on the gender composition of juries, they seem almost non-existent. Several states publish data on juror race, but none seem to publish data on juror gender. There were also not as many articles and NGO-type places that seemed interested in the topic. Most of the commentary seems to be historical and unsurprisingly focused on Women as Oppressed Objects. This is perhaps best summed up by the Wikipedia article Women in United States juries, which spends many sections discussing the historical exclusion of women from jury duty while only offering one short paragraph on modern juries:

Today, women frequently serve on juries. In many states, specific exemptions are available for people involved in child care. For example, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Oregon allow exemptions to jury service for nursing mothers.

I was able to find some references to the gender composition of juries in other common law countries. Why there are more men than women on juries says that women made up 45.5% of jurors in the Australian state of Victoria in 2019 (or 2018? I'm not sure which year "last year" is referring to). One piece by the Irish Times says:

An analysis by The Irish Times of 200 trials in the Central Criminal Court, which deals almost exclusively with rape and murder, shows that men dominated the jury in 57 per cent of cases.

Women dominated the jury in only 17 per cent of cases, while there was an even six/six split between the genders in 26 per cent of cases.

The gender imbalance was most noticeable in rape trials, where 61 of 100 juries were dominated by men compared to only 13 dominated by women. To put it another way, 723 men sat on the juries compared to 477 women.

"Dominance" is an admittedly strange way to quantify jury composition that screams p-hacking shenanigans, but the numbers do lean toward men being more common than women.

I don't have a grand point to make, but I thought this could spark some discussion. Some points that came to mind:

  • Why does there seem to be a relative paucity of published data on juror gender?
  • Do men really outnumber women in juries across the English-speaking world? Or is there publication bias at play, where only cases where women are underrepresented (and therefore can be presented as victims) get news articles written about them?
  • Do female jurors and male jurors act differently in important ways? The Irish Times article gives the example that female jurors are more skeptical of rape allegations and are more likely to acquit male defendants.
  • If one gender is being selected to juries more often than the other, which side is the "victim"? On the one hand, jury duty is something most people try their best to get out of, but on the other, sitting on a jury is a small bit of actual power that a person can wield over others, albeit with little to no benefit for themselves.

One argument I could entertain is that women are more likely to show up for jury duty in general, due to being more pro-social than men. Many people throw out their jury summons and expect no recourse.

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