The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

participation; figures under 1.0 represent an imbalance
toward female participation.
Participation rates are basically the average number of
turns per student. Women’s participation rate, for example,
is the number of turns taken by women divided by the
number of women enrolled in the course. When average
participation rates are equal—that is, when the average
participation rate for one group divided by the other equals
1.0—each group is participating in proportion to its
representation in class enrollment.

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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.
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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’