site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26564 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Does anyone have any statistics on the gender composition of juries, particularly in the United States?

I got curious about the question because at some point, I Noticed that in basically every high-profile court case I've paid attention to (which is, granted, not very many), every juror that was ever interviewed or reported upon was a woman. I also have a vague feeling that I've heard the phrases "all-female jury" or "all-woman jury" enough times for them to sound familiar, whereas the male equivalents sound totally alien to me. As a sanity check, I went and looked up the jury composition of some famous criminal trials, and it seemed to agree with my hunch (George Zimmerman's trial had 6 women and 0 men, and Derek Chauvin's trial had 8 women and 4 men). It seems plausible that women would be more likely to end up on juries for a variety of reasons, but it also seems plausible that I'm imagining everything.

When I went about trying to research the topic, the vast majority of jury demographic information out there seemed to be on race. The raw numbers are readily available (for example, here's a breakdown of jurors by race in Massachusetts for 2024 Q1 -- it seems basically proportional to the general population if you account for things like age). There are also commentaries abound about how important racial representation is for equal justice. One of the first Google search results for "juries by demographics" is this lengthy piece titled Race and the Jury, which is your standard mainstream race piece about how black people (and occasionally Hispanic people) are discriminated against in jury selection. Whether it makes a compelling argument is up to the reader, but the point is that these kinds of pieces exist in abundance and that the racial composition of juries is something that people care about. Given how racially charged the issue of policing (or "crime" depending on your viewpoint) is, this makes some amount of sense.

However, when I went to find statistics on the gender composition of juries, they seem almost non-existent. Several states publish data on juror race, but none seem to publish data on juror gender. There were also not as many articles and NGO-type places that seemed interested in the topic. Most of the commentary seems to be historical and unsurprisingly focused on Women as Oppressed Objects. This is perhaps best summed up by the Wikipedia article Women in United States juries, which spends many sections discussing the historical exclusion of women from jury duty while only offering one short paragraph on modern juries:

Today, women frequently serve on juries. In many states, specific exemptions are available for people involved in child care. For example, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Oregon allow exemptions to jury service for nursing mothers.

I was able to find some references to the gender composition of juries in other common law countries. Why there are more men than women on juries says that women made up 45.5% of jurors in the Australian state of Victoria in 2019 (or 2018? I'm not sure which year "last year" is referring to). One piece by the Irish Times says:

An analysis by The Irish Times of 200 trials in the Central Criminal Court, which deals almost exclusively with rape and murder, shows that men dominated the jury in 57 per cent of cases.

Women dominated the jury in only 17 per cent of cases, while there was an even six/six split between the genders in 26 per cent of cases.

The gender imbalance was most noticeable in rape trials, where 61 of 100 juries were dominated by men compared to only 13 dominated by women. To put it another way, 723 men sat on the juries compared to 477 women.

"Dominance" is an admittedly strange way to quantify jury composition that screams p-hacking shenanigans, but the numbers do lean toward men being more common than women.

I don't have a grand point to make, but I thought this could spark some discussion. Some points that came to mind:

  • Why does there seem to be a relative paucity of published data on juror gender?
  • Do men really outnumber women in juries across the English-speaking world? Or is there publication bias at play, where only cases where women are underrepresented (and therefore can be presented as victims) get news articles written about them?
  • Do female jurors and male jurors act differently in important ways? The Irish Times article gives the example that female jurors are more skeptical of rape allegations and are more likely to acquit male defendants.
  • If one gender is being selected to juries more often than the other, which side is the "victim"? On the one hand, jury duty is something most people try their best to get out of, but on the other, sitting on a jury is a small bit of actual power that a person can wield over others, albeit with little to no benefit for themselves.

More to the point, I personally think it's more possible female jurors are more likely to agree to be interviewed than men than any big disparity in selection, though I'm not quite certain why that would be.

One argument I could entertain is that women are more likely to show up for jury duty in general, due to being more pro-social than men. Many people throw out their jury summons and expect no recourse.

I only have one story of my wife being on a Grand Jury for two days. It was all women on the Grand Jury the first day, and just one man the second day.

From my Wife's description is that it was basically a bunch of cops giving powerpoint or oral presentations on the cases they were involved in. I got a strong impression of kids turning in their homework to the teachers. Mostly the teachers didn't want to fail their students, so all but one cop easily "passed". The one that didn't get an immediate pass did a terrible job and they were told to come back and try again.

I have an intuitive sense that women and men would be a bit different as jurors, but I honestly don't know how it would shake out in trials. I suspect our resident lawyers might know more.

My anecdotal experience as a trial attorney is that it's around 50/50 on average.

Anecdata of 1: I served on a jury that had about an even split of men and women, for a domestic violence case. The women on the jury seemed more upset about the case in general and had less sympathy for the defendant, but the case that the prosecution put forward was so flimsy, they were forced to agree that we had no choice but to acquit.

Do female jurors and male jurors act differently in important ways? The Irish Times article gives the example that female jurors are more skeptical of rape allegations and are more likely to acquit male defendants.

Hoekstra and Street (2021) use administrative data from Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties in Florida to show that are less likely to convict women of drug crimes (pg. 31). On all other crimes, there are no effects. They don't report effects of women generally, but judging by the graphs on pages 23-24 they don't seem to have much of an effect. (Incidentally, they also find slightly higher shares (between 51-53%) of women on juries in their sample.) They look at a large number of outcomes, but they do compute q-values so multiple testing doesn't appear to be an issue here.

In contrast, Anwar, Bayer and Hjalmarsson (2019) exploit a reform in England argue that juries with more women were more likely to convict in sex offense cases and more likely to convict in violent crime cases where the victim was a woman (pg. 36, 38, 40.) Personally, I find this paper less convincing simply because the specification used for a number of the claims is quite weak imo and the stronger specifications do not adjust for multiple tests. Also, it is not clear how applicable it is today.

Lehmann and Smith (2013) find in one specification that women are more likely to acquit (pg. 21). In five other specifications they find effects with the same sign but substantially smaller effect sizes which are not statistically significant. They also find that women are a slight majority in their cases, close to 57%. (They also find that the defense lawyers want more women on the jury.)

If you're curious about mock jury studies, I'd recommend looking at footnote 6 on page 3 from ABH (2019) which list a slew of studies disagreeing with each other.

In my braindead opinion, gender of jury is not talked about very much because it does not matter very much, or because it varies largely depending on place and time. Intuitively, this makes sense, because jury selection matters for trial outcomes. Lawyers are going to be thoughtful about who they select. In contrast, groups which are underrepresented on juries because they are disproportionately likely to be face hardship from serving, do have significant impacts on outcomes. I suspect this is why much of the conversation around jury selection focuses on race. In addition to all the other reasons.

Thanks for the studies, especially Lehmann and Smith. It's pretty comforting that the effect sizes all seem to be pretty small, possibly as a result of jury selection pruning the outliers (as you suggested). There does seem to be an overrepresentation of women (though not by as much as I had thought), but perhaps that's not really a problem.

In contrast, groups which are underrepresented on juries because they are disproportionately likely to be face hardship from serving, do have significant impacts on outcomes.

I'm not so sure this is true. Lehmann and Smith looked at race, religiosity, income, gender, and age, and of these traits, I would expect income, gender, and age to be most directly relevant in terms of selection effects before pre-jury selection. Income obviously due to hardship from serving, but also gender for things like being a single parent/sole breadwinner and age as a proxy for retiredness. Race is probably correlated with lots of these things, but I would assume that initial selection is probably less affected by race than by these other factors.

Glad to be of service!

Race is probably correlated with lots of these things, but I would assume that initial selection is probably less affected by race than by these other factors.

I agree that jury selection is less affected by race than other factors. However, given the demographics of criminal charges, a black defendant is substantially more likely to face an all white jury than a white defendant is.

Furthermore, given the salience of juries racial composition, a lot more research has been done on it. In fact Anwar, Bayer, and Hjalmarsson (2022) show in a short, sweet, and much more convincing article that having a higher proportion of jurors from black dominated zip codes results in lower conviction rates and less harsh sentences for black defendants (Table 2). No multiple testing problems here, they only test the obvious outcomes!

They also have a paper from a decade earlier, ABH (2012) showing that juries with at least one black defendant are substantially less likely to convict black defendants (pg. 34.) Incidentally, the reduction of having at least one black juror with a black defendant almost exactly cancels out the greater chance of conviction from the defendant being black.

I'm sharing these papers from the authors I've already linked to, because I could spend all day listing papers looking at this question. I think it's pretty clear that having more black jurors means black defendants are less likely to be convicted. I think what is more interesting is the interpretation of this result.

One interesting thing about ABH (2022) is that they find that white defendants don't get lower conviction rates from black jurors, conflicting with what was found in L&S, which concluded that black jurors reduced conviction rates for all defendants by roughly equal rates.

My initial hunch for explaining why black jurors would be more favorable to the defendant would have to do with a general skepticism of the system among black people (which would also help white defendants), but if the black juror effect only happens with black defendants, then a more in-group style explanation would make more sense. But this is all just speculation on my part.

I'm skeptical of in-group explanations. In both ABH (2012) and (2022) jury representation from black jurors or underrepresented neighborhoods is not sufficient to make up the full difference. This means that jurors of other races need to be complicit in the decisions as well.

(Incidentally, ABH 2012 makes the case even stronger. The authors say that black jurors were more likely to convict white defendants, but in reality that is not the case. Black Defendants in their sample appear more likely to convict everyone, but everyone equally. At least, that's my interpretation of Table 4. There is room for disagreement, and even after that disagreement it is no comment on the quality of decisions.)

I wonder how much age plays into it: if older people disproportionately serve on juries, then women would also disproportionately serve, even if serving rate conditioned on age was equal.

This struck me, from the Irish Times article:

In 2009, Irish academics who studied 108 rape trials found that male-dominated juries had the highest conviction rate. There was not a single [rape] conviction in the 17 cases which had female-dominated juries.

What's going on here (assuming that rape convictions aren't so rare that 17 non-convictions are possibly noise)? Maybe when there are men in a group, people fall in line behind a leader, but if there are not, you end up with egalitarian jockeying for social position that manifests as hung juries?

Probably need more actual studies to be able to productively speculate, though.

Ireland is a very socially conservative place that still has a strong religious streak. Women in these kinds of societies are much more censorious of other women's sexuality. Men are also much more systemizing and willing to argue for the 'right' answer, even if it is socially undesirable.

I was going to say 'no, Ireland very much is not that' and then I saw 2009. Yes, religious women would probably not vote to convict of rape of a woman who willingly went into a hotel room alone with a man, and most rape cases are things like that.

What's going on here (assuming that rape convictions aren't so rare that 17 non-convictions are possibly noise)?

Part of me is wondering if there's some insane sort of reverse causation somewhere - I'm not sure if Ireland has peremptory strikes, but if it does the use of them could plausibly correlate somewhat with case strength.

Women generally don't fall as easily for other women's bullshit in my experience.

I'm not implying all those rape cases are false allegations. I don't know how to explain the complete lack of conviction by the female dominated juries in that study.

Aren’t majorities of rape cases ‘they had sex, he thought she consented, she thinks they didn’t’? Wouldn’t be shocked if that strikes uninvolved normie women as face-saving BS on the part of a woman making a bad decision.

IIRC female hiring managers have stronger anti-woman biases than male hiring managers do. I wouldn't be surprised if that was true for jurors as well.

Women, in the US at least, are likely outnumbering men on juries in criminal trials in total. Judges are hesitant to force people to sit on a trial when they don't want to be there and men, in my experience, are more vigorous in their assertion that they are too busy to be there, have too important a job, and that they wont be impartial. This last one may be why the rape trials in Australia skewed male, if women were answering they couldn't be impartial in higher numbers. For example, the last jury I did was 8-4 F-M. One male successfully convinced the judge that America's airline industry would collapse without him. The rest was I suppose mostly randomness. But also the pool skews female because it excludes felons.

Usually cops get struck, which presumably mostly strikes men. But presumably the primary caregiver exception mostly strikes women.

Really juries seem mostly older than the general public.

This may be true, but one of the reasons to claim ineligibility for jury duty in my jurisdiction is being primarily responsible for the care of a small child, which presumably mostly qualifies women, although probably not as many as in the past, and possibly not enough to reverse the factors in the other direction.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats