The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Wisconsin
Law Review
 “New Legal Realism” Symposium (vol. 2005, no. 2).
85. Becker, “How to Do a Gender Study at Your Law School,”n.p.
86. 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.
87. This would help to quiet any concerns about “reverse discrimination.”
88. 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
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Notes to Pages 189–192

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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.
89. 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.
90. 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.
91. 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.
92. 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,