Metadata record for The Women on High Courts Database
135801
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
ICPSR metadata records are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
V1
The Women on High Courts Database
135801
http://doi.org/10.3886/E135801V1
Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon
Valerie J. Hoekstra
Alice J. Kang
Miki Caul Kittilson
Please see full citation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.
National Science Foundation. Law and Social Sciences Program
National Science Foundation. Law and Social Sciences Program
National Science Foundation. Law and Social Sciences Program
1323949
1323968
1324181
Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Escobar-Lemmon, Maria C., Hoekstra, Valerie J., Kang, Alice J., and Kittilson, Miki Caul. The Women on High Courts Database. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-05-19. https://doi.org/10.3886/E135801V1
women
women's rights
courts
foreign courts
judges
judge selection
representation
sex discrimination
gender roles
gender
gender issues
judicial
judicial
foreign judicial systems
global
Supreme Court justices
constitutional court
supreme court
appellate courts
world
This study provides over-time and cross-national data on women on high courts. The dataset includes information on the year the first woman was appointed and the gender composition of the high court. High courts include single peak courts as found in many common law countries and constitutional courts and highest appellate courts as found in many civil law countries. Information on the year of the first woman spans the period, 1945 to 2020. Data coverage on the number and percentage of women on high courts starts in 1970 or when the court is created, whichever comes first. Countries included have a population of 200,000 or greater. The data were compiled by the authors and their research teams drawing on a combination of secondary sources and information from countries' courts and judges.
global
country
country high court
Country high courts in independent countries with a population greater than 200
000.
aggregate data
event/transaction data
The sample includes country high courts in sovereign countries with a population of 200,000 or greater (in 2010).
For the year the first woman was appointed, the sample includes 210 country high courts between 1946 and 2020.
The data on the number and percentage of women on high courts is an unbalanced cross-national time-series between 1970 and 2013. In Version 1.0 of our dataset, we have 5,675 observations for the number of women on high courts (63.2% coverage) and 5,655 observations on the percentage of women on high courts (63.0%).
For more information on the sample, please consult the Appendix 1 of Escobar-Lemmon, Maria C., Valerie J. Hoekstra, Alice J. Kang, and Miki Caul Kittilson. Reimagining the Judiciary: Women’s Representation on High Courts Worldwide. Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press, 2021.
The principal investigators and their teams compiled information from a variety of materials including secondary sources and primary sources on the presence of women on high courts (e.g., annual reports of the judiciary, commemorative studies celebrating the anniversary of a court, newspaper articles). For certain countries, the researchers contacted chief justices, court presidents, registrars, or ministers of justice for information on the gender composition of high courts.