Gender Bias at the Brazilian Superior Labor Court

This paper examines the existence of gender bias within the Brazilian Superior Labor Court SLC(TST). Our analysis utilizes a database comprising all the lawsuits decided by the Brazilian Superior Labor Court SLC(TST) between August 2008 and June 2009. We explore, in particular, the fact that the lawsuits are randomly distributed among the judges (male or female) to analyze if the Reporting Judge's gender has an impact over the result of the lawsuit depending on the worker's gender. The results indicated that if we do not condition on nature of the lawsuit, the judges are not gender-biased. However, when we consider the type of lawsuit to be decided, we noticed that, as to some causes, such as:"salary equalization", "framing and affiliations", female judges tend to favor female individuals, whereas male judges are bent to favor male individuals. Our study enhances a possible institutional mechanism that may, at least, explain part of the salary differential between the genders.