The Role of Nominee Gender and Race at U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings Christina L. Boyd Paul M. Collins, Jr. Lori A. Ringhand We investigate an unexplored aspect of the U.S. Supreme Court confirma- tion process: whether questioning senators treat female and minority nomi- nees differently from male and white nominees. Applying out-group theory, we argue that senators will ask female and minority nominees more ques- tions about their “judicial philosophies” in an effort to determine their competence to serve on the Court. This out-group bias is likely to be exacer- bated for nominees not sharing the senator’s political party. Our results do not support racial differences, but they do provide strong evidence that female nominees receive more judicial philosophy-related questions from male senators. This effect is enhanced when the female nominee does not share the partisan affiliation of the questioning senator. Together, these find- ings indicate that female nominees undergo a substantively different confir- mation process than male nominees. We further find that this effect may be most intense with nominees like Justice Sotomayor, whose identities align with more than one out-group. B iased and discriminatory behavior toward gender, racial, and ethnic minorities continues to affect many sectors of American society today. The 2016 U.S. presidential election provides the most recent high profile example of this phenomenon. Vigorous debate erupted throughout the campaign about the ways in which gender shaped public perceptions of both candidates, and the extent to which Hillary Clinton was harmed or helped by being the first woman nominated for president by a major political party. Underlying this public debate is a rich academic literature, exploring how race and gender affect the way we select and assess public and private leaders, including politicians, judges, lawyers, business leaders, university deans and professors, and many We are thankful to Amy Steigerwalt, Susan Sterett, the anonymous reviewers, and participants at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association and the 2017 UMass Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Colloquium. Collins and Ringhand thank the Dirksen Congressional Center for a research grant that partially funded the data used in this project. We also extend our gratitude to Bryce McManus for his excellent assis- tance on this project. The data used for this project are available at https://blogs.umass. edu/pmcollins/data/. Please direct all correspondence to Paul M. Collins, Political Science Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 200 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003; e-mail: pmcollins@legal.umass.edu Law & Society Review , Volume 52, Number 4 (2018) © 2018 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved. 871