Gender Differences in Judicial Decisions under Incomplete Information : Evidence from Child Support Cases

We compare decisions by female and male judges in child support trials where a judge decides on the father's income allocation to children. We investigate two types of cases: 1) when fathers have a formal job, their income is known to judges, and awards are set as a fraction of it, and 2) when fathers work in the informal sector, their income is unknown to judges, and awards are given as a fixed amount of money. By exploiting random assignment of cases to judges, we find that female judges set lower awards in both cases in comparison to male judges. However, the gender gap under incomplete information is around two thirds the size of that under complete information. In exploring mechanisms underlying this difference, we propose a simple framework to elicit judges' beliefs about the unknown income in such cases by using their judicial behaviour in cases where income is known. We find that female judges estimate that the unknown income is higher, but still award lower amounts of child support than male judges do. Thus, gender differences act as a countervailing force and explain the attenuation of judges' gender differences in decisions under incomplete information