Student Participation and Social Difference 185room discourse can operate to produce a more encouraging atmosphere for learn-
ing and participation (possibly for all students, as well as for students of color).
Combining our findings with those of existing studies on race, we see that the overall
inclusiveness of the classroom and law school as truly egalitarian sites for learning
seems to connect with degrees of segregation versus diversity.
Gender in Law School Classrooms
There has been a continuing line of research for some years documenting gender
differences in all kinds of classrooms. At the elementary and high school levels, stud-
ies have found that girls are frequently excluded from classroom participation in a
number of ways.^40 This exclusion is part of a pattern that is thought to contribute to
declining performance throughout female students’ years in school.^41 Girls are re-
warded for docility, whereas boys are more likely to receive meaningful and exten-
sive instruction when they encounter difficulties and are also more likely to be called
on.^42 Teachers tend to insist that boys work through and solve problems, whereas
they more frequently hand girls the answers: “A sixth-grade girl is having trouble
working out a math problem. The teacher takes the pencil out of her hand and quickly
does the problem for her.”^43 In a math contest between the boys and girls in a differ-
ent class, one teacher kept score under the headings “Good Girls” and “Brilliant
Boys.”^44 Studies indicate that black female students are the most affected by this ex-
clusionary pattern, although there are also encouraging indications of African Ameri-
can girls’ psychological resilience in the face of this exclusion.^45
Studies of college education show a similar pattern and have linked the chilly
classroom and campus climate to a gradual process whereby women “revise and
scale down their career goals.”^46 Again, there are indications that this impacts
women of color more than it does white women.^47 A pioneering observational study
of 24 teachers at Harvard University found that male students spoke 2.5 times longer
overall than women in “the predominant classroom circumstance: i.e., the situa-
tion in which the instructor is male and the majority of the students are male.”^48
This detailed and nuanced study of classroom language found that in classes taught
by women, female students talked almost three times as much as they did when
taught by men.^49 In addition to the effects of the teacher’s gender, the Harvard study
identified a number of differences between men’s and women’s speech patterns
that contributed to inequalities in student participation:
- In the relatively freewheeling discussion format of these classrooms, women
students were more vulnerable to interruption and often did not come back
from being interrupted to talk again. - Women students tended not to compete with men students for floor time,
instead interrupting one another so that they wound up competing for the
relatively scarce female-dominated floor time. - Women and men tended to speak in clusters or runs, rather than speaking in
dispersed patterns; this meant that any existing pattern of domination or
underrepresentation would only be heightened.