The state just experienced another record-smashing race in terms of political spending. Some research suggests gender is one reason for all that cash flooding into the state to try and influence the election.

By Annie Pulley, THE BADGER PROJECT

The highly politicized race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court garnered national attention and smashed previous spending totals, again setting the record for most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. The race also maintained the court’s high percentage of woman justices. Some research suggest those two facts might be related.

With six of seven female justices, the Wisconsin Supreme Court holds the highest rate of women — 86 percent — of all the state Supreme Courts in the country, an analysis by The Badger Project found.

Across the country, 147 of the approximate 328 sitting justices – about 45% – on the highest courts in each state are women, according to The Badger Project analysis.

That number has slowly increased. In 2023, the last time The Badger Project ran these numbers, 41% of all justices on top state courts were female. In 2020, that number was 38%.

The state Supreme Courts with the next-highest proportion of female to male justices are the benches in Illinois, Michigan and Nevada.

Five of the seven Supreme Court justices in each of those states are women, a rate of about 71%.

Wisconsin Supreme Court justices serve 10-year terms and earn an annual salary of about $196,000.

No state high court is composed of men only, though in 2023, South Carolina had five male justices and no female justices. In 2025, South Carolina remains near the bottom with four male justices and one female justice, a proportion of 20%. Mississippi is dead last with one woman on its 9-justice court, a rate of 11%.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s four women justices give it a rate of about 44%.

Though the Wisconsin Supreme Court may be a ground-breaker in gender makeup, it is not racially diverse. All the justices are white. The last non-white judge to sit on the court was Justice Louis Butler, appointed to the state’s highest court by former Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, in 2004.

Butler lost his reelection campaign in 2008 to Michael Gableman, a white man.

Ideological composition of the court

Including the newly-elected and left-leaning Susan Crawford, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s six female justices are generally seen as being divided 4-2 on the ideological spectrum, with the liberals in the majority. The seventh justice, Brian Hagedorn, is a somewhat independent-minded, right-leaning justice and the court’s lone male at the moment.

Many of the cases the court rules on do not divide the justices ideologically, according to a March 12 analysis from the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

In the 2023-2024 term, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided 14 cases, and the bench split along the 4-3 partisan lines only four times.

However, issues likely to divide the court ideologically in the future include abortion, collective bargaining rights for public sector unions and voting rights, such as absentee voting and voter ID laws.

Effect of gender on judicial outcomes

A 2010 study on female federal appellate judges suggests their presence rarely affects the outcomes of cases.

“Rarely, though,” the study reports, “is not never.” 

The study, “Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging” by Christina Boyd and others, found an exception when courts rule on gender discrimination disputes.

The presence of female judges often caused their male counterparts “to vote in a way they otherwise would not – in favor of plaintiffs,” the study reported.  

Sally Kenney, a political science professor at Tulane University and an expert on women in the global judiciary, argues for deemphasizing that study and recognizing that Boyd’s research found no differences in every other area of law it examined.

Using gender to explain how judges decide cases is not “very helpful,” but gender can be relevant in evaluating how judges ascend to the bench, Kenney said.

State-level election campaigns for female judicial candidates often must spend more per vote than men, Kenney said. And federally, where judges are appointed, women face double standards in the types of questions they’re asked during confirmation hearings and can be approved at lower rates, she added.

Ultimately, women are significantly represented in the legal profession yet continually underrepresented in the judiciary, Kenney said. 

In her 2013 book, “Gender and Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter” Kenney argued that one reason feminists may seek out evidence that a judge’s gender influences how he or she decides a case as a way to argue that more women should hold positions in the judiciary. 

It’s less a matter of how women judges will decide cases and more that they are in a position to decide cases and work within a system that doesn’t unfairly exclude them, Kenney explained.

“It’s just a fundamental part of democracy that women participate,” she said. 

‘Page one of the playbook’

It’s also common to paint female candidates in judicial elections as soft on crime, especially if they previously worked as a defense attorney.

That’s “page one of the playbook,” Kenney said.

Though both candidates in the recent race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court — Crawford and her right-leaning, male opponent Brad Schimel — have worked as prosecutors, the two sides attacked each other repeatedly in TV advertisements for being “soft on crime.”

This is an age-old tactic that generally hurts female candidates more than their male counterparts and acts to simplify what’s at stake in a judicial election, Kenney said.

Notably, the Wisconsin Supreme Court hears relatively few criminal cases.

Percentage of female justices on top courts in each state

Sreejita Patra, junior investigator, contributed to this report.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

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