186 Difference
- These teachers often let an emphasis on “keeping the flow of discussion going”
take priority over encouraging inclusion, permitting those with the quickest
response time to dominate classroom discussion; participation then became
“based on quick thinking instead of deep or representative thinking” and was
biased toward the more verbally assertive (who in this study tended to be white
males as opposed to “minorities of either sex” or white females). - Because participation earlier in the class session was the best predictor of
participation overall, a bias toward volunteers with the quickest response time
early in the class contributed to a growing hierarchy in participation overall.^50
These results suggest that women might be disadvantaged in classrooms where
teachers rely heavily on volunteers (a finding that, as we will see, has been repli-
cated in multiple studies and settings).
A number of other observational studies have found similarly high participa-
tion rates (especially where students volunteer to speak) and frequent interrup-
tions on the part of male students when compared with females.^51 In survey studies
of college teaching, male students report higher rates of talking than do women,
and these reported rates of participation and interruption go up in classes taught
by women.^52 At the same time, a number of these studies have indicated that classes
taught by women might be more egalitarian in gendered dimensions of overall
participation than are classes taught by men, because women students report par-
ticipating a great deal more in classes taught by women as well. In the present study,
the classes with the smallest gender disparities (which in these classes favor women,
but only slightly)—and therefore the most egalitarian overall distributions by
gender—are found in two of the three classes taught by women professors. One
survey of 1,059 students in 51 classes in a small midwestern college stressed the
effects of peer interaction on gender dynamics, noting that “student gender is a
significant component in class participation. Male students are more likely to offer
comments or raise questions in their classes. Females respond to the emotional
climate of a class more than do males, and most importantly, females’ participa-
tion is related to their confidence.”^53 This is important to keep in mind in assess-
ing the meaning of silence, because it is against the backdrop of existing research
on girls’ and women’s differential silence in educational settings, across many lev-
els, that we must understand the gender patterns found in law school classrooms.
In general, studies of gender dynamics in college and graduate-level classrooms have
tended not to look systematically at such aspects of context as status and kind of
school.^54 But a more general study of graduate and professional training in the
United States found that there were higher numbers of women at lower-status
schools; it also found that where women were a minority, there were more reports
of biased treatment.^55
There have been far more studies of gender than of race in law school class-
rooms. The rich literature in this area has focused in part on the distinctive char-
acteristics of law teaching; perhaps the most prominent debate focuses on the use
of the Socratic method. With very few exceptions, empirical studies of gender in
law teaching have relied either on self-report or on observation by students who
were themselves participants in the classes being studied. These studies have