194 Difference
by a male teacher in a regional law school. It is in the classes taught by women, and
in the local law school class taught by a man, that women actually improve their
participation rates when moving from extended or focused dialogues to less exten-
sive exchanges. This finding is most striking for Classes #6 and #8 because they were
the classes with the highest percentage of time spent in shorter exchanges (42% and
46%, as compared with 5–24% in the other classes). Once again, Class #6, taught by
a woman in a local law school, has the most egalitarian distribution of discourse by
gender, including an absolutely balanced distribution of focused dialogue turns. We
are left with two interesting questions about the interaction of gender with teaching
style: Why is it that women participate more in extended dialogues than they do in
shorter exchanges in the more Socratic classrooms of this study? And how do we
understand the difference in women’s participation between Classes #6 and #8, both
of which are informal conversational classes taught by women?
One possible reason for the distribution we have found around extended dia-
logues could be that extended, formal (Socratic) exchanges tend to rely less on
volunteering and often begin with a teacher calling on a student. If this is the
case, higher participation rates for women in extended dialogues could indicate
their unwillingness in certain (more Socratic) classes to volunteer answers for
shorter exchanges. Conversely, higher participation rates in the shorter exchanges
could reflect more willingness to volunteer. A number of the studies noted ear-
lier suggested that women students tend to volunteer less, so that relying on
volunteers may help to create gender imbalances in the discussion. Our results
give some support to this observation, although again with the caveat that this
dynamic changes in different kinds of classrooms. We find that women’s par-
ticipation relative to men’s is lower in the category of volunteered turns than in
called-on turns in five of the eight classrooms, including all classrooms in elite/
prestige law schools.^90 In two of the three more Socratic classrooms, women
participate more in called-on as compared with volunteered turns. Indeed, in
Class #5, taught by a male professor in an elite/prestige law school, there is a
dramatic shift in favor of male participation in the volunteer turns category: a
difference of 100%. Overall, women’s participation ratio is 32% lower in volun-
teered than in called-on turns in male-taught classes. Again, there are some in-
teresting complications; in Class #4 (another more Socratic class in which women
fare better in extended dialogues), women actually have slightly better ratios in
volunteered than in called-on turns. It is likely that some of the more fine-grained
aspects of classroom atmosphere in that class, which have already been discussed,
may have introduced intervening factors that influenced students’ feelings about
volunteering. But in two of the three Socratic classrooms, it is plausible that
women’s reluctance to volunteer contributes to their better participation ratios
for Socratic as opposed to shorter exchanges: in these classes, professors gener-
ally called on students during Socratic dialogues, so that most voluntary partici-
pation occurs in the shorter exchanges (see Table 8.7).^91
Another interesting finding emerging from analysis of volunteered versus
called-on turns sheds some light on the very different features of two classes taught
by women, Class #8 (elite school) and Class #6 (local school). Recall that both classes
are taught in informal style, but that they are at opposite ends of the scale in terms