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Interactions with Powerful Female Colleagues Promote Diversity in Hiring

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Jorgen Harris discusses the effect of hearing cases alongside female judicial colleagues on the probability that a federal judge hires a female law clerk.

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 7, 2023

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The study examines whether working with women influences federal appellate judges in hiring female clerks. The context is the federal appellate court system, where judges have significant power and their clerkships are critical for future legal careers. Currently, women represent about 25% of appellate judges but make up around 40% of clerks, despite over half of recent law graduates being female. This video video indicates that women are underrepresented in top legal positions compared to their male counterparts.

Previous research in social psychology suggests that working with diverse individuals can reduce prejudice and change attitudes. The study utilizes a unique setting in appellate courts, where judges are randomly assigned to cases and staff (clerks) to analyze how interactions with female colleagues affect hiring decisions. The findings reveal that increased interactions with women lead to a higher likelihood of hiring female clerks, specifically a 7% increase for each standard deviation rise in such interactions.

However, the effect does not persist over time, suggesting that while exposure to female colleagues positively influences hiring decisions, it does not lead to permanent changes in attitudes. The study implies that fostering workplace diversity at high levels (like judicial appointments) may create a feedback loop, promoting more gender diversity in lower ranks and ultimately benefiting the legal profession.

The broader implications of the research suggest that meaningful interactions among diverse groups can reduce prejudice and improve workplace dynamics, calling for policies that encourage such interactions to combat societal segregation and its negative effects.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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What we're doing in this study is we're looking at whether

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working with women increases the likelihood

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that federal appellate judges hire female clerks.

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And so the context of this study is the

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federal appellate court system.

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This is the level right

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below the Supreme Court in the United States.

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So for most cases, these are the judges

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who have the final word on the interpretation of US law.

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It's a essentially the elite

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of the judicial of the judicial field.

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It's a very powerful, very powerful group of people.

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The appellate court clerkships, the, the jobs

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that we're looking at for, you know,

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for entry level positions are also a really important

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stepping stone, both to positions in the judiciary itself,

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but also to other elite positions within law.

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People who become corporate law partners, for example,

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are very frequently people

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who have had appellate clerkships in the past.

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The other thing to mention in terms of context,

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because we're looking at gender, this is a context

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with a real low level of gender diversity in a way

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that's pretty typical of other elite professions.

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So about a quarter of federal appellate judges are women.

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About 40% of the people who get these clerkships are women.

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In contrast, about 50%, a little more than 50% now

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of recent law graduates are female.

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So, so we see that women are a lot less likely

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to get these appellate clerkships than are men.

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Interestingly, when we look one level down,

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so we look at the district court clerkships, about 60%

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of the people getting those jobs are women.

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So it doesn't look like women are

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less interested in these jobs.

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It looks like they're substantially less likely

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to get the very top jobs than are their male

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colleagues from the same law schools.

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The question of whether working with people

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or interacting closely with people

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who are different from you affects your beliefs

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and affects your attitudes is a very old question.

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This goes back to work

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by a social psychologist in Gordon Allport in the 1950s

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who essentially said the best way

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to reduce someone's prejudice is

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to have them work closely in a cooperative manner

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with someone who's different from them.

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However, it's a really hard question to get evidence for

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because in most contexts, when we see a person working

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with someone who's different from them,

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that's gonna be that person's choice.

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And so who we see you working

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with is gonna tell us a lot about what your beliefs

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and prejudices were before you work with that person.

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As a result of that, the best evidence on this question

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tends to come from contexts where someone

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is closely interacting with someone different from them out

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for reasons other than their own choices.

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So, you know, we either do that via experiments

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or we do that via what we call natural experiments,

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which is context where some institution puts you in contact

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with someone else without your, your,

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your decisions playing a role.

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So I would say my sort of what I think are, are, are some

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of the best pieces of research on this question.

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There's a couple recent experimental papers looking at

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where essentially the researchers made amateur soccer

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leagues and assigned people to teams.

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Either teams that are, homogeneous in terms of religion

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or cast, or teams that are heterogeneous, right?

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Where you're work, you're playing with lower cast people,

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you're, you're a Christian playing with Muslims,

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and what they saw is that being assigned

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to teammates who are different from you

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Really increased measurable aspects of your,

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openness to those people, right?

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You're more likely to sit next

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to a Muslim at the award ceremony if you had a Muslim

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on your team, right?

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You're also more likely to express positive

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views of Muslims, et cetera.

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So those sorts of, you know, those sorts

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of experiments can be very powerful.

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The big challenge with those is that there's only so much

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that you can experimentally vary in someone's life

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because doing an experiment like this is really expensive.

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And of course, right, you, we, we can't interfere

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with people's lives too much for the sake of research.

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So the other thing that we do, right, as much

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as we would love to as researchers, the other thing

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that we tend to do is we look at contexts

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where somebody else is essentially

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doing an experiment for us.

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So the classic example of this is

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to look at freshman year roommate assignments in college.

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We say, okay, you know, you fill out your housing form,

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you send it in, and then they basically pull your name out

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of a hat and stick you with a roommate.

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And what we can see in that, in, in that body of research is

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that being randomly assigned

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to a freshman year roommate who's different from you,

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for example, if you're a white student,

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you're assigned to a black roommate.

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That seems to have, again,

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a measurable effect on things like who your friends are

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and what your stated racial attitudes are, at least

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for a little while, at least for that first year of college.

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The thing that's been very hard for us to look at is a,

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looking at effects of these sorts

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of interactions on powerful people,

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because powerful people don't tend to get assigned to stuff

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by drawing their names out of hats.

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Um, it's also hard for us to look at workplace interactions,

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both because it's hard for workplace interactions

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to generate useful data and also, again,

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because these are contexts where,

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usually someone's being assigned to a workplace interaction

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for specific intentional reasons, right?

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Not, not a, as a result of random chance.

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So what we realized is the appellate courts have

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two properties that make them really perfect

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for studying this question.

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The first thing is that in order to make the decisions,

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as in with the intention

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of making the decisions in these cases,

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fair judges are assigned

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to cases at random conditional on which judges are working

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within a particular court.

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So I'm in California, which

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is represented by the ninth Circuit.

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If a case goes to the ninth circuit,

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there will be three judges chosen at random out of the 60

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or so judges in the ninth circuit to hear that case.

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As a consequence of the fact

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that the judges work together in groups

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and are assigned to cases at random, it means

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that judges are assigned to each other at random

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as well, if that makes sense.

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And so, you know, if I end up spending a lot of time working

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with you or not very much time working

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with you over the course of a year,

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that's gonna come down primarily to luck of the draw.

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So that gives us this very useful context

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where we see these powerful people being assigned

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to cases at random in a similar way

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that roommates would be assigned to, to roommates at random.

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That's the first really useful thing.

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The second really useful thing is that judges have staffs

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of law clerks to help 'em research their legal decisions

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and write their legal decisions.

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These are essentially apprentice judges.

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They tend to hire these people out

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of the top law schools in the pro in the country.

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Normally the top graduates of those top law schools

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and judges make a hiring decision

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As individuals and they do so almost every year.

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So if you get a law clerk, you know, a clerkship,

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you're not gonna work for the ninth circuit,

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you're gonna work for a specific

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judge who decided to hire you.

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And as a consequence of that,

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we can see the judges make decisions

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that reflect something about how they believe women

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and men perform in the judiciary on a regular basis, right?

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Pretty close to every single year.

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The last thing that's really nice here is that the decisions

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that judges make are public,

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at least on cases that they publish.

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And so as a result of this, it's not just

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that judges are assigned at random to working

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with each other, it's also that we can see a paper trail

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generated by those interactions

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that tell us who was working with whom.

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So what we did with this, what we did

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with this is essentially we said we're gonna construct a

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measure where we ask what percentage

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of your interactions every year were with female colleagues.

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And then what we do is we say, we expect that

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to be random conditional and which court you're in

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and which year, which year we see you in.

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So, you know, essentially

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what we do is we regress our dependent variable,

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which is did you hire at least one woman

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onto the percentage unit

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of interactions you had with female colleagues?

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And what we saw is that working

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with female colleagues really substantially increases your

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likelihood of hiring a woman.

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Um, your likelihood of hiring at least one woman increases

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by about seven percentage points if you have a one standard

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deviation increase in your

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interactions with female colleagues.

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So one thing, you know,

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so we see this large substantial increase in your likelihood

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of hiring a woman in the year

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after you interact with female colleagues at a higher rate.

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We don't see any evidence of persistence, right?

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So the next year you're gonna have a new set of interactions

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and you're not gonna have some sort

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of permanent shift in your beliefs.

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That's not something that that surprises us too much

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because these are very routine interactions.

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These are interactions that judges have every single year.

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So overall, this is I think, a really, promising and,

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and surprisingly positive result

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because what this suggests is that the type of work

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that most of us do, right?

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Most of most of us are not assigned to ju

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to colleagues at random in this way,

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but most of us do work closely with some

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of our colleagues over the course of our careers

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and on a year to year basis.

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And this suggests that those sorts

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of ordinary workplace interactions can have really

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significant effects on your decisions.

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I think there's a couple things that we're able

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to contribute to this literature.

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The first thing is that we're pretty unusual in being able

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to look at the decisions of powerful people.

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If we think about in working

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with other people influencing your beliefs, my

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my belief coming into this study would be

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that a college first year is gonna be more malleable than a

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70-year-old fellow federal judge, right?

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Um, when you're early in your life,

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your each experience is gonna have a bigger effect on you

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because everything is new to you.

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I wouldn't have been surprised if what we saw is

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that once someone reaches the end of their career,

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their beliefs are relatively fixed.

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So our work is suggesting that that might not be the case.

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That even these very powerful people are influenceable

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through professional interactions through exposure to people

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who are different from themselves.

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And that's important because if we think about

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gender racial diversity in the US labor market, the people

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who are making consequential decisions

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that influence diversity are generally gonna be older people

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who are established in their careers and who are powerful.

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This is a group of people we really care about.

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The other thing I think is important about this

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that we're able to contribute is

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that we're looking at hiring decisions.

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Those are really important high stakes decisions.

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A lot of the research in this, in this field,

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and this is again still very valuable,

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but a lot of the research in this field is looking at stuff

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like surveys or implicit association tests that try

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to measure someone's beliefs

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or they're looking at relatively small decisions

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that people are making, right?

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As I mentioned before, decisions like, do you sit next

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to a Muslim at the award ceremony?

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It's been difficult for us to see how this sort

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of intergroup contact affects the

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decisions we care the most about.

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And hiring decisions is a great example of this.

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The last thing I'd say that I think is really important here

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is the fact

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that these are ordinary professional interactions.

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These are things, these are the types

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of interactions we expect most professionals

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to have over the course of their career.

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And so even though the context we're looking at is very

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special and very unique,

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and you know, we're only able to do this work

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because of this special characteristics of this context,

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we think that it sheds light on a much broader array

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of important professional context

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in the United States and around the world.

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Diversifying the tops of the profe of professions is likely

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to have real benefits for people at the entry level.

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One of the things, so for example,

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the Biden administration has made a real intentional effort

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to promote a diverse

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or a more diverse set of candidates to the bench, right?

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To the federal judiciary.

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And so sort of the most direct thing

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that we can say here is our work suggests

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that appointing more diverse judges

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to the judiciary is likely

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to result in more diverse people

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receiving appellate clerkships.

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And what we might expect is that means

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that there's gonna be this sort of

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positive feedback loop, right?

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We're diversifying the top

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of a profession now is gonna mean the people

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who are gonna enter the top of the profession later

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will be a more diverse group of people.

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So I think, you know, when we think about sort

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of is it important for us to have CEOs not all be men,

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is it important to have lot, you know,

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legal partners, not all be men.

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What our work is suggesting is that

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that's important not just for the people at the elite

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who are getting these top jobs,

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but also for the rest of us, right?

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For people whose, whose lives are affected

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by the decisions made by people in that elite.

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So I think that's sort of the most direct and, and

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and the easiest thing to say in terms of

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what the policy implications of our work are,

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I think the broader policy implication,

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and this gets a little bit fuzzier,

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but the broader policy implication is that

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segregation can have negative consequences in terms of

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maintaining negative beliefs about outgroups.

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And so in a wide variety of context, we might expect that

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if we can find ways to encourage people to interact with

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and work with people who are different from themselves,

11:51.275 --> 11:52.695
that's likely to reduce levels

11:52.755 --> 11:56.205
Of prejudice, you know, over, over our society.

11:56.625 --> 11:59.165
And that's tricky because as economists we think

11:59.165 --> 12:01.405
that people tend to not wanna work with those

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who have prejudice beliefs when those prejudices are

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directed at them, right?

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And people with prejudice beliefs tend not to wanna work

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with people they're prejudiced against.

12:08.585 --> 12:10.085
So what we tend to see is that, you know,

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when we let people do their own thing, we should expect

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to see a reasonable amount

12:14.125 --> 12:15.965
of segregation in the market, right?

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As people who experience prejudice sort

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of flee from the prejudice, people

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who are prejudice flee from those they don't like.

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So what this suggests is that that sort

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of natural process in the market might lead prejudices

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to maintain themselves longer than they would otherwise.

00:00 - What we're doing in this study is we're looking at whether working with women increases the likelihood that federal appellate judges hire female clerks. And so the context of this study is the federal appellate court system. This is the level right

00:13 - below the Supreme Court in the United States. So for most cases, these are the judges who have the final word on the interpretation of US law. It's a essentially the elite of the judicial of the judicial field. It's a very powerful, very powerful group of people. The appellate court clerkships, the, the jobs that we're looking at for, you know, for entry level positions are also a really important stepping stone, both to positions in the judiciary itself,

00:38 - but also to other elite positions within law. People who become corporate law partners, for example, are very frequently people who have had appellate clerkships in the past. The other thing to mention in terms of context, because we're looking at gender, this is a context with a real low level of gender diversity in a way that's pretty typical of other elite professions. So about a quarter of federal appellate judges are women. About 40% of the people who get these clerkships are women.

01:04 - In contrast, about 50%, a little more than 50% now of recent law graduates are female. So, so we see that women are a lot less likely to get these appellate clerkships than are men. Interestingly, when we look one level down, so we look at the district court clerkships, about 60% of the people getting those jobs are women. So it doesn't look like women are less interested in these jobs. It looks like they're substantially less likely

01:25 - to get the very top jobs than are their male colleagues from the same law schools. The question of whether working with people or interacting closely with people who are different from you affects your beliefs and affects your attitudes is a very old question. This goes back to work by a social psychologist in Gordon Allport in the 1950s who essentially said the best way to reduce someone's prejudice is

01:45 - to have them work closely in a cooperative manner with someone who's different from them. However, it's a really hard question to get evidence for because in most contexts, when we see a person working with someone who's different from them, that's gonna be that person's choice. And so who we see you working with is gonna tell us a lot about what your beliefs and prejudices were before you work with that person. As a result of that, the best evidence on this question

02:10 - tends to come from contexts where someone is closely interacting with someone different from them out for reasons other than their own choices. So, you know, we either do that via experiments or we do that via what we call natural experiments, which is context where some institution puts you in contact with someone else without your, your, your decisions playing a role. So I would say my sort of what I think are, are, are some of the best pieces of research on this question.

02:35 - There's a couple recent experimental papers looking at where essentially the researchers made amateur soccer leagues and assigned people to teams. Either teams that are, homogeneous in terms of religion or cast, or teams that are heterogeneous, right? Where you're work, you're playing with lower cast people, you're, you're a Christian playing with Muslims, and what they saw is that being assigned to teammates who are different from you Really increased measurable aspects of your,

03:04 - openness to those people, right? You're more likely to sit next to a Muslim at the award ceremony if you had a Muslim on your team, right? You're also more likely to express positive views of Muslims, et cetera. So those sorts of, you know, those sorts of experiments can be very powerful. The big challenge with those is that there's only so much that you can experimentally vary in someone's life

03:21 - because doing an experiment like this is really expensive. And of course, right, you, we, we can't interfere with people's lives too much for the sake of research. So the other thing that we do, right, as much as we would love to as researchers, the other thing that we tend to do is we look at contexts where somebody else is essentially doing an experiment for us. So the classic example of this is to look at freshman year roommate assignments in college.

03:44 - We say, okay, you know, you fill out your housing form, you send it in, and then they basically pull your name out of a hat and stick you with a roommate. And what we can see in that, in, in that body of research is that being randomly assigned to a freshman year roommate who's different from you, for example, if you're a white student, you're assigned to a black roommate. That seems to have, again, a measurable effect on things like who your friends are

04:02 - and what your stated racial attitudes are, at least for a little while, at least for that first year of college. The thing that's been very hard for us to look at is a, looking at effects of these sorts of interactions on powerful people, because powerful people don't tend to get assigned to stuff by drawing their names out of hats. it's also hard for us to look at workplace interactions, both because it's hard for workplace interactions to generate useful data and also, again,

04:27 - because these are contexts where, usually someone's being assigned to a workplace interaction for specific intentional reasons, right? Not, not a, as a result of random chance. So what we realized is the appellate courts have two properties that make them really perfect for studying this question. The first thing is that in order to make the decisions, as in with the intention of making the decisions in these cases,

04:51 - fair judges are assigned to cases at random conditional on which judges are working within a particular court. So I'm in California, which is represented by the ninth Circuit. If a case goes to the ninth circuit, there will be three judges chosen at random out of the 60 or so judges in the ninth circuit to hear that case. As a consequence of the fact that the judges work together in groups

05:11 - and are assigned to cases at random, it means that judges are assigned to each other at random as well, if that makes sense. And so, you know, if I end up spending a lot of time working with you or not very much time working with you over the course of a year, that's gonna come down primarily to luck of the draw. So that gives us this very useful context where we see these powerful people being assigned to cases at random in a similar way

05:33 - that roommates would be assigned to, to roommates at random. That's the first really useful thing. The second really useful thing is that judges have staffs of law clerks to help 'em research their legal decisions and write their legal decisions. These are essentially apprentice judges. They tend to hire these people out of the top law schools in the pro in the country. Normally the top graduates of those top law schools and judges make a hiring decision

05:57 - As individuals and they do so almost every year. So if you get a law clerk, you know, a clerkship, you're not gonna work for the ninth circuit, you're gonna work for a specific judge who decided to hire you. And as a consequence of that, we can see the judges make decisions that reflect something about how they believe women and men perform in the judiciary on a regular basis, right? Pretty close to every single year.

06:19 - The last thing that's really nice here is that the decisions that judges make are public, at least on cases that they publish. And so as a result of this, it's not just that judges are assigned at random to working with each other, it's also that we can see a paper trail generated by those interactions that tell us who was working with whom. So what we did with this, what we did with this is essentially we said we're gonna construct a

06:40 - measure where we ask what percentage of your interactions every year were with female colleagues. And then what we do is we say, we expect that to be random conditional and which court you're in and which year, which year we see you in. So, you know, essentially what we do is we regress our dependent variable, which is did you hire at least one woman onto the percentage unit of interactions you had with female colleagues?

07:01 - And what we saw is that working with female colleagues really substantially increases your likelihood of hiring a woman. your likelihood of hiring at least one woman increases by about seven percentage points if you have a one standard deviation increase in your interactions with female colleagues. So one thing, you know, so we see this large substantial increase in your likelihood of hiring a woman in the year

07:19 - after you interact with female colleagues at a higher rate. We don't see any evidence of persistence, right? So the next year you're gonna have a new set of interactions and you're not gonna have some sort of permanent shift in your beliefs. That's not something that that surprises us too much because these are very routine interactions. These are interactions that judges have every single year. So overall, this is I think, a really, promising and, and surprisingly positive result

07:41 - because what this suggests is that the type of work that most of us do, right? Most of most of us are not assigned to ju to colleagues at random in this way, but most of us do work closely with some of our colleagues over the course of our careers and on a year to year basis. And this suggests that those sorts of ordinary workplace interactions can have really significant effects on your decisions.

08:01 - I think there's a couple things that we're able to contribute to this literature. The first thing is that we're pretty unusual in being able to look at the decisions of powerful people. If we think about in working with other people influencing your beliefs, my my belief coming into this study would be that a college first year is gonna be more malleable than a 70-year-old fellow federal judge, right? when you're early in your life,

08:28 - your each experience is gonna have a bigger effect on you because everything is new to you. I wouldn't have been surprised if what we saw is that once someone reaches the end of their career, their beliefs are relatively fixed. So our work is suggesting that that might not be the case. That even these very powerful people are influenceable through professional interactions through exposure to people who are different from themselves. And that's important because if we think about

08:53 - gender racial diversity in the US labor market, the people who are making consequential decisions that influence diversity are generally gonna be older people who are established in their careers and who are powerful. This is a group of people we really care about. The other thing I think is important about this that we're able to contribute is that we're looking at hiring decisions. Those are really important high stakes decisions. A lot of the research in this, in this field,

09:18 - and this is again still very valuable, but a lot of the research in this field is looking at stuff like surveys or implicit association tests that try to measure someone's beliefs or they're looking at relatively small decisions that people are making, right? As I mentioned before, decisions like, do you sit next to a Muslim at the award ceremony? It's been difficult for us to see how this sort of intergroup contact affects the

09:42 - decisions we care the most about. And hiring decisions is a great example of this. The last thing I'd say that I think is really important here is the fact that these are ordinary professional interactions. These are things, these are the types of interactions we expect most professionals to have over the course of their career. And so even though the context we're looking at is very special and very unique,

10:03 - and you know, we're only able to do this work because of this special characteristics of this context, we think that it sheds light on a much broader array of important professional context in the United States and around the world. Diversifying the tops of the profe of professions is likely to have real benefits for people at the entry level. One of the things, so for example, the Biden administration has made a real intentional effort to promote a diverse

10:26 - or a more diverse set of candidates to the bench, right? To the federal judiciary. And so sort of the most direct thing that we can say here is our work suggests that appointing more diverse judges to the judiciary is likely to result in more diverse people receiving appellate clerkships. And what we might expect is that means that there's gonna be this sort of

10:47 - positive feedback loop, right? We're diversifying the top of a profession now is gonna mean the people who are gonna enter the top of the profession later will be a more diverse group of people. So I think, you know, when we think about sort of is it important for us to have CEOs not all be men, is it important to have lot, you know, legal partners, not all be men. What our work is suggesting is that

11:08 - that's important not just for the people at the elite who are getting these top jobs, but also for the rest of us, right? For people whose, whose lives are affected by the decisions made by people in that elite. So I think that's sort of the most direct and, and and the easiest thing to say in terms of what the policy implications of our work are, I think the broader policy implication, and this gets a little bit fuzzier,

11:30 - but the broader policy implication is that segregation can have negative consequences in terms of maintaining negative beliefs about outgroups. And so in a wide variety of context, we might expect that if we can find ways to encourage people to interact with and work with people who are different from themselves, that's likely to reduce levels Of prejudice, you know, over, over our society. And that's tricky because as economists we think that people tend to not wanna work with those

12:01 - who have prejudice beliefs when those prejudices are directed at them, right? And people with prejudice beliefs tend not to wanna work with people they're prejudiced against. So what we tend to see is that, you know, when we let people do their own thing, we should expect to see a reasonable amount of segregation in the market, right? As people who experience prejudice sort of flee from the prejudice, people

12:19 - who are prejudice flee from those they don't like. So what this suggests is that that sort of natural process in the market might lead prejudices to maintain themselves longer than they would otherwise.

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