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192 Difference

woman professor, fell at the more conversational end of the spectrum in terms of
teaching style. This highlights an interesting issue regarding the effects of less for-

mal style; the class in which women spoke most and the class in which they spoke
the least both shared the characteristic of a relatively informal teaching style, and
in both cases we had women professors. We see, then, the interestingly divergent

possible effects of the same style: it can create a relaxed atmosphere in which women
feel freer to speak, but conversely, the lack of formal structure can also make room

for societal patterns of gender dominance in discourse to emerge. Note that de-
spite the overall inequality of time and turns in favor of men in Class #8, taught by
a woman in an elite law school, more of the women in the class participated than
did men (100% of women versus 86% of men), reminding us of the complexities
involved in assessing inclusiveness.^88
Discussions of the effects of pedagogical structure on gender dynamics in law
school classrooms have often focused on a particular aspect of formal versus in-
formal teaching: the Socratic method. As noted earlier, some authors have sug-
gested that Socratic structure has a particularly chilling effect on female students’
participation. In this study, we coded extended one-on-one exchanges between
student and professor as “focused” dialogue (our closest measure for Socratic-type
structuring).^89 Chapter 7 outlined the distributions of different kinds of dialogue
in the classrooms of the study (see Table 7.1). As we’ve seen, these figures can be
broken down into three categories: the modified Socratic classes, with 45 to 60%
of the time (and 74 to 86% of the turns) spent in extended dialogue (Classes #5,
#4, #1); the classes characterized by shorter exchanges, with 21 to 29% of the time
(and 34 to 60% of the turns) spent in extended dialogue; and the predominantly
lecture class, with 2% of time (and 16% of turns) spent in Socratic-style exchanges.

table 8.5

Percentage of Students Who Spoke at

Least Once, by Gender

Class Women Men

Elite/Prestige

296 91

8 100 86

575 90

Regional

466 73

790 78

Local

6 100 100

384 92

We were able to track participation

by individual speakers for seven of the

eight schools.