The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

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.
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 In two of the three more Socratic classrooms, women