Interactions with powerful female colleagues promote diversity in hiring

We study the effect of hearing cases alongside female judicial colleagues on the probability that a federal judge hires a female law clerk. Federal judges are assigned tojudicial panels at random and have few limitations on their choices of law clerks. Using a unique dataset of federal case records merged with judicial hiring information, we find a significant effect of the fraction of co-panelists who are female ona male judge’s likelihood of hiring a female clerk.This finding suggests that increases in the diversity of the upper rungs of a profession can createopportunities at the entry-level.