Create drupal node programatically and set custom select list field
With a select list, you need to store the key value of the custom field.

I just noticed that you're storing taxonomy term reference value, which means you should be storing the term ID and not the actual text value of pending.

Theres a handy function which allows you to grab the TID based on a term name:

$term = taxonomy_get_term_by_name('pending');
$node-&gt;field_referee_status[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['tid'] = $term-&gt;tid;


See the docs here.

EDIT

To save into a normal textfield select list:

$node-&gt;field_referee_status[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['value'] = 'pending';