- There were no statistically significant differences between the male and female
coders. Id. The class monitors tracked turns in terms of gender of speakers, class atten-
dance, whether the turn was volunteered or not, and the individual identities of speakers
(which allowed for a variety of calculations regarding repeat speakers). - Id., 531.
- Id., 533.
- Id. The Harvard report suggests that some of this disparity may be attributable
to the fact that there tends to be higher overall participation in classes taught by women. - Id., 533. This finding fits well with others pointing to men’s greater propensity
to volunteer. It also suggests that women may fare better in classes where they are
called on. - K. Wilson and Levin, “The Sex-Based Disparity in Class Participation.” This was
the first student-run observational effort to consider the issue of volunteered turns. As an
anthropologist who is also participating in the research in this area, I have watched with
great interest a process by which student-run observational work appears to have built on
itself over the years, with each new study incorporating and improving on innovations from
prior efforts (as well as from other sources). At a time when there is a great deal of discus-
sion of how best to encourage empirical work in the legal academy, I think we should take
note of this kind of process; it is tempting for trained social scientists to express only skep-
ticism about efforts by legal professionals in this regard, but absent formal graduate social
science training for everyone involved, it might be important to view the public discus-
sion itself as a forum for genuine interdisciplinary communication and advancement. On
concerns over empirical work published in law reviews, some quite understandable, see
Epstein and King, “The Rules of Inference”; on attempts to build productive interdiscipli-
nary discussion about the intersection of social science and law, see Erlanger et al., “Fore-
word”; Macaulay, “The New versus the Old Legal Realism”; and other articles in the Wisconsin
Law Review “New Legal Realism” Symposium (vol. 2005, no. 2). - Becker, “How to Do a Gender Study at Your Law School,”n.p.
- Certainly, as social psychologists relying on power-dependence theory might
assert, a more talkative speaker may in fact be dependent on the less talkative speaker, and
withholding speech can be an expression of power. And, in individual instances, student
silence can of course perform this function. Mertz, “Silence and the Speakable.” But the
fact that student silences may have multiple meanings interpretable at the individual level
does not obviate the wider structural and institutional significance of those silences. This
is particularly the case in light of the patterns documented from childhood through law
school of both differential silencing and lowered confidence among some students, as well
as in light of the institutionalized meaning of assertive speech in legal education and insti-
tutions more generally. - This would help to quiet any concerns about “reverse discrimination.”
- In what could be considered the reverse situation, scholars have had to mull over
this kind of complexity in unraveling the “Queen Bee” problem, where one or two domi-
nant female speakers might skew the numbers so that women’s situation looks better than
it actually is. We did not find evidence for this effect in the classrooms of this study. How-
ever, the general point about complex gender dynamics is reinforced by an analysis of the
statistics on mean numbers of individual student turns and minutes by gender among the
classes of this study. See Mertz et al., “What Difference Does Difference Make?,” 47–48.
On the one hand, the gender inequities in Class #8 persist in these statistics, with female
students having a mean number per speaker of 17.7 minutes as compared with men, who
had 28.3 minutes. At the same time, women students’ mean number per speaker in most
of the other classes fell between 3.8 and 4.7 minutes. Thus, women students who did speak
266 Notes to Pages 189–192