Examining gender bias in juror decision-making on a sexual assault case

Abstract

To examine gender bias in juror decision-making on a sexual assault case, we had 134 participants read a 216-word vignette depicting an ambiguous sexual assault scenario. Participants were asked to render a dichotomous verdict, rate their confidence in their verdict, and answer a series of questions regarding the situation they read. In addition, participants completed the Gender-Inclusive Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (Urban & Porras Pyland, 2022) and the Punishment Orientation Questionnaire (Yamamoto & Maeder, 2019). What participants did not know was that we manipulated the pronouns of both the defendant and complainant in a 3 (defendant: she, he, they) x 3 (complainant: she, he, they) design. We predicted that there would be a main effect for both defendant and complainant gender on continuous verdict confidence, yet neither effect was supported with a statistically significant result. We also predicted that there would be an interaction effect between defendant and complainant gender on continuous verdict confidence, but this was also not supported. A key issue in this study was the small sample size which significantly reduced power. It is encouraged that future research continues to investigate how non-binary actors are perceived by mock jurors in the context of sexual assault since it is a significant gap in the literature. Finally, future research should also examine different gender combinations when looking at mock juror decision-making in sexual assault cases to ensure all possible gender combinations within a sexual assault case are researched thoroughly to avoid a gender bias in a real courtroom.