in Class #8 spoke over four times longer than in most other classes. The classroom with
the next highest mean minutes per female student speaker was our most egalitarian class
(#6), in which women students who spoke had means of 8.7 minutes, less than half the
time of the women in Class #8. This is for the most part reflective of a class structure in
Class #8 that allowed the students who did participate to take much longer than average
time on the floor.
- It is, of course, important to remember that we are here measuring participation
in extended dialogues. This is only a rough proxy for Socratic exchanges; we have noted
some of the complexities involved in attempting to determine what makes a dialogue
Socratic, and then in trying to ascertain the effects of Socratic dialogue on participants.
Quantitative measures of participation obviously do not capture how participants feel
about their experiences; it would be quite possible for two students who spoke for similar
amounts of time in extended dialogues to feel quite differently, one feeling exhilarated and
the other alienated and angry. As noted in my previous descriptions of the individual
classes, the classes that I have characterized as modified Socratic did conform to the pro-
totypical Socratic model along a number of qualitative dimensions as well, although they
were all characterized by more humor and less harshness than would be expected under
the stereotype. - Remember, however, that one of the most gender-imbalanced classes in favor of
men was also a short-exchange class, so that we cannot read in any simplistic way from
class format to gender dynamics without looking at other aspects of classroom discourse
as well. - The observational studies at Yale, Chicago, and Harvard all had similar find-
ings regarding women’s lower rate of participation in volunteered turns (see text). Note
that in my study, the skewing toward men in elite/prestige, and regional law schools was
exacerbated when we calculated overall time as opposed to merely counting turns. Hence,
it is possible that the disparities revealed in other observational studies, which counted
turns, may actually be slighter than the actual disparities in time between male and fe-
male students. - Research in elementary school settings has already stressed the importance of this
aspect of smaller, informal classrooms: “Small group experiences may actually reinforce
rather than counteract gender stereotypes” unless there is a conscious effort made to coun-
teract this tendency. Weinstein, “The Classroom as a Social Context,” 511. Well-structured
cooperative teaching methods were found to be superior for all students, in addition to
working better in creating more successfully integrated and egalitarian classrooms. Inter-
estingly, the most recent student-run Yale observational research concluded that “students
prefer and find more equitable a managed classroom discussion which allows a range of voices
to be heard.” Yale Law Women, Yale Law School, 14. One-third of the respondents preferred
“panels or on-call” systems to other systems for managing classroom discussion, including
the more classic “cold-call” approach, in which students are called on without warning. - To complete the picture, we should mention that Class #3 had equal participa-
tion ratios for men and women in both volunteered and called-on categories, meaning that
the distinction between volunteering and being called on does not seem to have gendered
dimensions in this class. - Students from Class #6 mentioned the unusually high number of older students
in the class—merely a reported perception on their part, but perhaps worth noting in
passing here. Class #3 was a night school class in a local law school and thus also a poten-
tial candidate for having a higher than usual number of older students. - Class #8 was also quite small, 32 students, as opposed to the 53 students in Class
#6; so again, we might want to ask about variations in control and relative structuring of
Notes to Pages 192–195 267