Student Participation and Social Difference 189the most elite (and presumably empowered) women. On the other hand, some have
suggested that working-class women are in fact more likely to buck the system,
whereas elite women have gotten where they are in part because they did not chal-
lenge the elite men around them.^70 Another hypothesis is that the pressure for
conformity to gendered norms around assertive speech becomes greater in elite
institutions, affecting both women professors and students.^71 In any case, these
findings point us to relatively unexplored questions about the interaction of stu-
dent and professor gender with institutional status.
A second, more recent student effort during 2001 at the Yale Law School in-
volved classroom monitoring in 23 classrooms, conducted in combination with a
survey of law students and interviews with professors.^72 As noted, the survey and
interviews revealed that both students and faculty had the impression that female
students were more hesitant than male students about speaking in class. These
perceptions were given support by the observational findings from classroom
monitoring, which showed that in terms of total participation, “men still appear
to dominate classroom discussions more than women.”^73 This effect was exacer-
bated when only volunteered turns were examined.^74 On an encouraging note,
women’s participation did reach equal or greater proportional levels in compari-
son to men’s in a number of larger courses, including first-year courses.^75 Interest-
ingly, women dominated more in courses taught by male professors than they did
in those taught by female professors, although we would want to be cautious about
drawing too broad a conclusion from this.^76 The Yale report did not find any “dis-
tinctive male or female mode of participation.”^77
A student group at Harvard Law School recently undertook a similar investi-
gation, monitoring each of 32 courses for four to seven of the class meetings dur-
ing the spring semester of 2003 (for a total 190 class meetings monitored, averaging
around six class meetings per course).^78 The students adopted a method whereby
one male and one female student enrolled in each course both simultaneously coded
the same class meetings.^79 They found a significant difference between women and
men in participation rates, a difference that they report was largely due to differ-
ence in voluntary participation.^80 The “top talkers”—the small group of students
who accounted for a high proportion of student turns—were “overwhelmingly
male,” and this was despite even-handed treatment of speakers by professors. As
in the Yale study, crude distinctions in pedagogical style (e.g., between Socratic
and non-Socratic teaching) did not seem to generate any clear gender difference
in participation.^81 In this study, there was an even more marked pattern of dispro-
portionate male participation in classes taught by female professors: “A male stu-
dent was 40% more likely than a female to volunteer during a class meeting with a
male professor, compared with 106% more likely in courses taught by women.”^82
On the other hand, there was variation in women’s participation rates among the
different classes monitored, with women more likely than men to speak in some
of the classes (particularly in response to being called on).^83
The remaining two observational studies were conducted at the University of
Chicago Law School. One, conducted by students, tracked participation for two
weeks in nine different courses and included consideration of volunteered versus
called-on turns.^84 In 1994–1995, following this initial student effort, Chicago hired