The Administrative Hearing Experience:

Differential treatment of men and women by employers has recieved much attention in recent years. At the extreme, disparity in the treatment of women in the military, federal employment, institutions of higher learning and private employment has been identified, and remedial actions initiated through legal means instituted under various federal laws. Researchers have also investigated disparity in the treatment of men and women within the legal system, although most attention has been focused on criminal judicial processes. Non-criminal legal proceedings constitute an institution in which possible disparity in both the treatment and attitudes of women and men participants has not been fully analyzed. Administrative hearings comprise a large number of legal proceedings in which women claimants face primarily men hearing officers. Hearings involving unemployment insurance and welfare claims, and Social Security, provide the most likely confrontation women will have with the largely male dominated judicial system. This study compares both objective aspects of administrative hearings and claimants' perceptions of the hearings for men and women involved in unemployment insurance claim appeals. Interview data and quantitative analyses of apporximately 350 hearings conducted in a field experiment in New Mexico during 1980 provide the information for the analyses. The findings reported show that women claiments are more prone to lose in appeals than men claimants even when other confounding factors such as issues involved are controlled. Women claimants also tend to talk more than their male counterparts in the hearings. While patterns in questioning did not differ for women and men, women definitely talked more than men, although it did not appear to improve their chances of winning. In contrast to the striking differences in hearing outcome and the length of testimony provided by men and women claimants evaluations of the hearing experience were quite similar for the men and women. This exploratory research suggests that more work should investigate success rates of men and women in other non-criminal legal proceedings, and continue to test explanations for any observed differences in such rates.