Gender Differences in Legal Disputes: The Case of French Labor Courts

This paper focuses on gender differences in French Labor Courts. We empirically investigate data from the pretrial conciliation phase and the judges' decisions in the trial phase. For that purpose, we compiled a novel database from legal documents. The results are twofold. First, women are less likely to reach pretrial agreement compared to men when they sue their employer, except for dismissal cases. Second, we find that all things being equal, women are more likely to succeed in the trial phase. Taken together, these results suggest that women bring, on average, higher qualify cases to the French Labor Court. This effect might be explained by the intitial demands that are brought against the employers, as well as gender differences in bargaining behavior during the pretrial conciliation phase.