Gender Favoritism among Criminal Prosecutors
研究发现男女检察官对被告整体处理差异不大，但都对自己同性别的被告更宽容，这种偏袒导致同性别检察官处理的被告刑期平均减少约5个月（约8%）。
Prosecutors enjoy wide discretion in the decisions they make but are largely unstudied by quantitative empirical scholars. This paper explores gender bias in prosecutorial decision-making. I find that male and female prosecutors exhibit small and statistically insignificant differences in their treatment of defendants overall but demonstrate relative leniency toward defendants of their own gender. Such favoritism at charging translates into a sentencing gap of roughly 5 months of incarceration for defendants who are paired with an own-gender prosecutor versus an opposite-gender prosecutor, which represents a roughly 8 percent reduction in sentence length at the mean. The estimates do not appear to be driven by differences in case assignments for male and female prosecutors.