The Brennan Center reports:

A recent NPR story highlights new research by Maya Sen and Adam Glynn examining how the gender of a judge’s child could affect judicial rulings. “Sen and Glynn studied 2600 rulings of 240 judges on the US Court of Appeals and they looked to see if having a daughter made a difference to their rulings.” “We found having at least one daughter means that a judge will be about 7 percentage points more likely to vote in sort of a feminist direction on gender related cases,” said Sen.“Things like employment discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, abortion, Title IX, things like this.” The researchers found the effect was strongest among male Republican judges. The difference in rulings “emerges only for cases involving gender. It doesn’t emerge for cases involving bankruptcy or other kinds of the law.” NPR correspondent Shankar Vedantam concludes, “I think what the study is pointing to is the fallacy of imagining that judges rule on the bench without bringing their personal experiences to bear. The better question to ask might be, what biases do you want the judges to have, not whether the judges are biased at all.”