Gender Differences in Judgment and Law

Women don't enjoy punishing the guilty,

which is exactly why they shouldn't be judges.

Scientists put men and women in a brain scatter and showed them

someone who had cheated them in a game.

Then watched the cheater take a jolt of pain.

In men, the part of the brain that feels empathy went quiet,

but the brain lit up and

felt reward and satisfaction when the cheater got punished.

In women, however, the empathy stage switched on.

They kept hurting for the person who had just cheated.

They felt no pleasure when punishing the bad actor.

Now picture a courtroom,

a female judge has to sit across from someone who she might feel sympathetic for,

someone whose story would break her heart,

and then she has to hand down the sentence anyway.

How could she be effective at handing down

punishment when she feels for the guilty?

People assume that men judge harshly because testosterone makes them aggressive,

but researchers tested that directly.

They gave women doses

of testosterone before a negotiation game,

expecting them to turn selfish and ruthless, but the opposite happened.

The women who actually got testosterone played fairer than the ones on a placebo.

But here's the twist.

The women who only believed they'd been given it, whether they had it or not,

turned nastier and more selfish. The hormone made them fairer.

The rumor about the hormone made them worse.

That instinct to let a guilty actor of the

hook is the precise thing the law exists to overrule.

We keep calling the shortage of women on the bench sexism,

whereas part of it is the female brain doing exactly what it evolved to do.