Women judges, when working with male judges, impose harsher sentences?

 Well, it is an interesting study but I am unclear what exactly they are finding.  It is behind a firewall so I cannot clarify.  From Judge Peer Effects in the Courthouse by Ozak Eren and Naci H. Mocan.  From the Abstract:

Although there exists a large literature analyzing whether an individual’s peers have an impact on that individual’s own behavior and subsequent outcomes, there is paucity of research on whether peers influence a person’s decisions and judgments regarding a third party. We investigate whether consequential decisions made by judges are impacted by the gender composition of these judges’ peer group. We utilize the universe of decisions on juvenile defendants in each courthouse in Louisiana between 1998 and 2012. Leveraging random assignment of cases to judges, and variations in judge peer composition generated by elections, retirements, deaths and resignations, we show that an increase in the proportion of female peers in the courthouse causes a rise in individual judges’ propensity to incarcerate, and an increase in the assigned sentence length. This effect is fully driven by female judges. Further analysis suggests that this behavior is unlikely to be a reflection of an effort to conform to evolving norms of judicial stringency, measured by peers’ harshness in sentencing, but that it is due to the sheer exposure to female colleagues.

The methodology looks reasonable.  Would have been good to know whether we are dealing with a large volume of cases or small.  Also would have been good to know whether there any trend lines over the fourteen years.  And as always - Show the damn effect size!  If the increase in assigned sentence increases from 12 months to 18 months, I am interested.  If it increases from 12 months to 12.5 months, then we almost certainly have an artifact of the analytical design.  Particularly if we are dealing with too few cases.

Lack of a reported effect size and absence of a sample size should have disqualified this from publication.  There is too much cognitive pollution as it is.

Accepting on, possibly misplaced, good faith that there is a real finding and that it has a material effect size, we still have one further mystery, which might be explained by the actual paper which is restricted.

What does it mean when they say "This effect is fully driven by female judges."  Does it mean that women judges when on a mixed panel, are more likely to assign harsher and longer sentences than they otherwise would do?  That seems the obvious reading.  But it is possible that they are accepting some unstated standard that all panels are usually male and that merely by adding female judges, the panel sentence becomes more harsh.  

Kind of a critical point.

Marking this as potentially very interesting but near cognitive pollution owing to deficient results reporting and ambiguity in writing.