Despite attempts to raise awareness of gender inequity in the court system for more than 40 years, gender bias continues to be a challenge to uproot in New York State courts. A 2020 report found that 51% of female attorneys said that male judges appear to give more credibility to male attorneys’ arguments.
Meanwhile, Felicia Raphael, executive director of the Hon. Betty Weinberg Ellerin Permanent Commission on Women in the Courts, said that she is working in a time where the general public seems to have a diminished appetite to address gender-based inequity from the height of the #MeToo era.
The solution, she says, has to be education.
“I think if the public understood that a little better, that would help with the credibility issue. It wouldn’t address the underlying — I don’t know how many thousands of years old — perspective that women are less than or women are less trustworthy or less honest, but I think it would go a long way with helping with juries and just in general,” Raphael said.
To meet the moment, Raphael is building programs, including a new video podcast, to better inform the public about the double standards that women face in the court system and what the court system is doing to address them. The other pillar of Raphael’s plan involves a major survey on gender and equity of an unprecedented scale.
Commission on Women in the Courts Director Felicia Raphael on the progress made to expand education, tackle gender-based credibility issues
