ABSTRACT
Damages for personal injuries is a field prone to gender biases. Empirical exploration of the issue, however, is far from being simple, especially in Civil Law countries, given a pervasive lack of transparency and explicitness on the details of reasoning and treatment of numerical values. Accounting for that feature, our research sketches a canon of analysis that goes beyond the words. To deal with risks of sample design, our database encompasses all the decisions made during the time span selected (20 years, more than 20,000 decisions) by an Appellate Court. Scrapers designed ad hoc have been instrumental to that aim. In our case study, the well-known earnings gap, usually assumed the cause of others, second order gaps, ought not to be mirrored by pecuniary damages, for the ‘shadow price’ of non-remunerated activities must be computed and should counterbalance earnings lost. Nonpecuniary damages, in turn, must be independent of earnings, being theoretically free from that effect. Nonetheless, we found differences with statistical significance in any of them (pecuniary and non-pecuniary), in favor of men. Moreover, some reverse engineering in search of the primary source of the gap leads to find a systematic bias in percentages of disability against women, even in cases where the predictable result should be the opposite. In more general terms, the said obscurity on numerical values, usually covered by rhetoric, renders difficult any honest scrutiny without the assistance of high technology and some sophistication, and shields decisions to criticism. Accordingly, it helps perpetuate gaps whenever existed.
Acciarri, Hugo and Delbianco, Fernando and Ramírez Muñoz de Toro, Gonzalo, Gender Gap and Personal Injury Compensation. Judicial Opacity and Reverse Data Engineering (March 7, 2023).
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