Alexandra Geist

There is considerable psychological science and research on gender stereotypes that applies to organizational leadership roles. However, there has been little to no emphasis on women in leadership roles in the legal field – specifically attorneys. Gender bias in the workplace and in leadership positions is associated with backlash if women in these roles fail to conform to gender stereotypic behaviors expected of them. The purpose of this experimental study is to examine the influence of gender bias in the context of female legal professionals to determine to what extent gender bias affects perceptions and evaluations of these legal professionals and whether gender bias in this context resembles the demonstrated gender bias in the context of perceptions and evaluations of women in organizational roles. The relative abundance of reviews and experimental studies and correlational studies about the relevance of gender bias and discrimination within the legal fields allows us to identify hypotheses and to test them experimentally. There have been multiple accounts of gender bias and discrimination faced by women in the legal field on different levels. They stem from gender role prescriptions, implicit bias based on gender, and perceived notions of effectiveness when in the courtroom. The effects of gender role prescriptions are seen when the success of an attorney correlates with how well they meet their gender-stereotypical behaviors while also meeting the demands of the job (Morris & Brown, 2019). And although half of all incoming law students are women, only 30% of lawyers are women and only 15% of all federal judges are women (Durant, 2004). This is a large disparity between lawyers and judges solely based on gender. Other study results have shown that judges and juries treat male and female attorneys differently (Lee, 2016). Law students themselves have also reported holding stereotypical views and implicit biases when entering the law field. These feelings of inequality faced by female attorneys in the legal profession highlight a concerning phenomenon that has not been looked into sufficiently through empirical studies. The goal of this study is to investigate how prescribed gender roles and biases affect female attorneys in the courtroom and how perceptions of an attorney’s behavior is influenced by their gender. A majority of the existing research on implicit gender bias and discrimination has been focused on industrial and organizational psychology and pertains to leadership roles in corporate workplaces (Heilman et al., 2024). But some qualitative studies have shown that personal characteristics are often seen as gendered and prescribed to lawyers and their work (Dau-Schmidt et al., 2021). While these gendered perceptions are applied in personal contexts, the suggestion here is that they extend to how men and women are perceived when doing their jobs in the legal field. There have been few empirical studies looking into this phenomenon and they tend to be focused on a certain aspect of an attorney’s role such as an empirical study conducted in 2019 focused on how traditional gender roles affected how attorneys' anger in a closing statement was perceived (Salerno & Phalen, 2019). Or conversely they look on a very broad scale such as a study conducted in 2010 tested whether implicit gender bias may drive gender discrimination in the legal profession (Levinson & Young 2010). Based on the empirical studies that have been done and their findings and limitations we have designed a study that will look into gender bias against female attorneys in not just one aspect of their role nor on whether that bias exists.