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February 2006Findings From the University of Washington School of Law Gender Studyby Deborah Maranville and the University of Washington School of Law Gender Study Committee If you are a typical reader of this journal, you attended law school, whether last year or half a century ago. As a result of that experience, you probably retain a certain, sometimes "morbid," fascination with legal education. You may also be interested in legal education because you hire and work with, or against, new law-school graduates. You may have very definite ideas about what law schools should be doing. You have no doubt noticed that many more women are graduating from law schools now than even 10 years ago.1 Readers who closely follow the entry of women into legal education will have encountered the burgeoning literature on women's law-school experiences. Most prominently, in their book Becoming Gentlemen,2 Lani Guinier, Michele Fine, and Jane Balin showed that women at the University of Pennsylvania Law School performed worse than predicted, and they argued that a primary cause was the Socratic method. Fortunately, Penn appears to be an exception3 and "gender studies" at several other schools have shown that women perform just as well as men on traditional measures of success.4 Nonetheless, in a variety of ways, women as a group experience law school differently than men. In early 2001, members of the Law Women's Caucus at the UW School of Law asked then-Dean Roland Hjorth to authorize a gender study of the law school, because they were concerned about the tangible progress and subjective experiences of women at the law school. Both Dean Hjorth and his successor, W.H. "Joe" Knight, agreed, and the Gender Study Committee was duly authorized.5 We proceeded by gathering statistical information on measures of student performance and hiring of faculty, and surveying the classes of 2002, 2003, and 2004. In this article, we share some of what was learned.6 Female Students Perform Well and Participate Actively The first task of the Gender Study Committee was to gather statistical information about students and faculty. We wondered whether female and male students at our law school perform equivalently as measured by academic honors, participation in law reviews and moot court membership. The news on that front was good. The UW School of Law has a reputation as a positive place for female students,7 and that reputation is warranted. Women at the UW School of Law do well on measures of student performance such as election to Order of the Coif and participation on journals.8 Our finding that UW women perform as well as men on traditional measures of law-school performance is consistent with the results of studies at the Brooklyn,9 Chapman,10 and Iowa11 law schools. The UW study confirms that women's lesser success on the traditional measures described in Becoming Gentlemen is limited to certain schools. The study also reinforces the lessons that all law schools are not alike and that drawing broad conclusions from a study of a single institution can be misleading. Slow but Steady Progress One reason female law students do well at the UW may be that the School of Law has a history of providing more opportunities for women than some other law schools. Three women were among the 12 members of the first law-school class that entered in 1899,12 and the School of Law continued to admit women throughout its history, though in small numbers. Marjorie Rombauer, the first full-time tenure-track female faculty member who was not a librarian, was hired in 1960, making the UW School of Law a leader among American law schools in hiring women. Linda Hume, the School of Law's second tenure-track female faculty member was hired in 1972.13 When we started the study, we determined that since the School of Law's initial hiring of Prof. Rombauer, women have been relatively well represented in the faculty overall, fluctuating between 20 percent in 1987 and 45.8 percent in 2001. Predictably, they were found in much lower numbers among tenured faculty — nine percent in 1987 rising to 23.8 percent in 2001. During much of this period, women were well represented among not-yet-tenured tenure-track faculty — rising from 25 percent in 1987 to 50 percent in 2001, with a peak of 75 percent in 1998. As at many schools, the legal writing and clinical faculties at the UW were heavily female and, during most of this period, were primarily non-tenure track. We updated our faculty numbers as the study ended and found that the numbers have continued to improve, though parity has not been achieved and the picture has become more complex due to the expansion of job categories that now include research professors and professors without tenure by reason of funding. The UW School of Law has continued to hire women in tenure-track positions, though half of our female assistant professors were initially hired in untenured legal-writing or clinical positions, and the bulk of our newly hired assistant professors are men. Women are also included in the ranks of deans and faculty with honorary "professorships," though again in smaller numbers than the men. Problems With Moot Court? We did discover that in 2000 to 2003 women were significantly underrepresented on the Moot Court Honor Board. This may result from self-selection linked to differences between men and women as they enter law school — though we rather doubt it — as from 1996 to 1999 we found no such difference in moot court participation. Based on anecdotal reports, the disparity may be related to a sexist environment that pervaded the Moot Court Honor Board during part of that period. We have invited further discussion within the law-school community, not only out of an obligation to be fair to our female students, but also because we do not believe that we serve our male students well if we do not equip them to create environments that are positive for both men and women. Surveying the Student Body As we pursued the study, we decided to survey our students about their subjective experiences. The Committee wanted both to learn about the School of Law and to perform a study that would provide a useful contribution to the literature on legal education generally. So, we consciously built on two lines of research. First, gender studies have looked at a range of issues, from whether women participate as much in class as men to the presence of sexual harassment. Second, research on law-student mental health shows that law students enter law school just as healthy (or unhealthy) as the general population, but that quickly changes for the worse and stays bad throughout law school. (This trend continues into the legal profession, as those familiar with the WSBA's Lawyers' Assistance Program know.) We also followed another thread concerning the effect of law school on public-interest orientation. To build on the research on law-student mental health, we surveyed first-year students twice, first administering a shorter survey at orientation in September 2002, obtaining almost 100 percent participation, and administering a longer survey in property classes to a large proportion of the first-year class after winter-quarter grades came out in April 2003. This allowed us to confirm that the mental health of entering students is comparable to the broader population and that it declines substantially before the end of the first year. During the 2002-2003 academic year, we also surveyed approximately half of the 2Ls and 3Ls in courses that are required or taken by a large, representative number of students. The surveys covered a wide range of topics: demographic background, satisfaction with law school, reaction to different teaching methods, class participation, experience of harassment or unfair treatment, mentoring, career interests, depression as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory, and internal versus external motivation. (What are internal and external motivation and why would we measure it? Internal motivation refers to doing things because we enjoy them for their intrinsic value. External motivation refers to doing things for external rewards such as grades, money, and prestige. Some researchers have hypothesized that law students become more depressed because they shift from internal motivation to grade-, money-, and prestige-driven external motivation.) 14 In important respects, the UW Gender Study replicates and extends the results of other studies from both the gender-study and mental-health lines of research. Three findings may be particularly interesting to members of the legal profession. Levels of Unfair Treatment and Sexual Harassment The levels of unfair treatment and sexual harassment at the UW School of Law appear to be relatively low compared to other institutions studied,15 though few discussions of this issue are based on methodologically sound surveys. Four percent of UW students reported that they had "personally experienced sexual harassment or inappropriate sexual behavior" at the School of Law. We don't have a good baseline comparison from other schools, but anecdotal reports suggest that these levels are relatively low. Because we think that any amount of sexual harassment is too much, we hope to reduce this level through education and discussion. More striking was the finding that by the third year, a fifth of students, both women and men, report experiencing unfair treatment on the basis of gender. The three major problem areas cited by students that require attention and improvement are: moot court, on-campus interviewing, and the classroom. We suspect that to some extent these results reflect a lack of consensus in our broader culture about what treatment is considered fair or unfair. Some members of the UW School of Law community are uncomfortable acknowledging the different experiences of women, as though to acknowledge gender differences undermines equal treatment of our law students. This group includes faculty with a long-standing commitment to "equal treatment," female students who bristle at the well-meaning efforts of members of the profession to address personal issues such as suitable dress or style for moot court competitions or interviews, and white male students who do not perceive themselves as privileged and resent intimations that they are. In addition, faculty efforts in the classroom to address controversial or difficult issues, such as rape or forensic investigation of sensational crimes against women, continue to provoke controversies with gendered dimensions. Nonetheless, the Committee believes that we should address perceived unfair treatment within the on-campus interviewing process, moot court, and classroom environments. Both moot court and on-campus interviewing bring large numbers of non-law-school visitors to campus. The School of Law should begin conversations with these visitors about students' law-school expectations. These conversations may help smooth the path between law school and the profession. In addition, we should provide public and private forums in which to discuss these issues with students. Classroom experiences are in some respects more difficult to address, because faculty traditionally have a great deal of independence at the UW. In the early 1990s, a group of female students from Law Women's Caucus met with faculty to offer suggestions on how to improve the classroom climate for women. Many faculty members responded well to this effort, and incorporated suggestions into their teaching. Some observers commented, however, that the faculty who could benefit most from this effort did not attend. The Committee hopes that presentation of its report will provide an opportunity to revisit these issues. Differences in Subjective Experience: The Socratic Method, Class Participation, Careers, Depression Subjectively, UW female law students do seem to have a less positive experience than men in several respects: women respond less favorably to the Socratic method, they ask fewer questions in and outside of class and seek less advice from faculty, law school is less supportive of women's career goals, and women are more likely to become depressed during law school. Our finding that women are less comfortable than men with the Socratic method is consistent with the findings of gender studies at seven Ohio law schools16 and at the University of Pennsylvania.17 Our perception is that UW faculty are familiar with the long-standing objections to the Socratic method, including the findings of Becoming Gentlemen that the method — when practiced in a way designed to humiliate — adversely affects women, and have modified their teaching styles accordingly. That these efforts are widespread is evidenced by our finding that current UW students are more likely to think the Socratic method is used too little, rather than too much. Faculties are experimenting with a range of alternatives to the Socratic method. These include mastery learning, in which students are not bound by a curve but can achieve a particular grade by completing a range of assignments at a designated level of competence; the "expert system," in which students are told in advance what day they will be called on; online case questions and problem sets that provide feedback to students throughout the course; and simulation exercises in which students engage in lawyering tasks such as drafting complaints, answers, and summary-judgment motions, and orally arguing motions or appeals. Our finding that UW women respond less favorably to the Socratic method is not "hot-off-the-presses" news. Nonetheless, we hope that the UW faculty will continue to experiment with a range of teaching styles that address the learning styles among both women and men, and promote active learning and develop our students' oral skills and ability to think on their feet. Our data on class participation show that by self-report UW women volunteer in class as often as men, but they are significantly less likely to ask questions in or outside the classroom. They respond more favorably, however, to advice and encouragement from faculty than do the men. Our results also show that women are significantly more likely to participate in class when they have a "high level of comfort with classmates" and when the "professor is female." The finding that women are more likely to participate in a classroom with a female professor replicates the findings of a study at Berkeley.18 The finding that female students' class participation is higher with a female professor suggests to us that the School of Law must maintain its effort to hire female faculty. Likewise, the administration should continue to work to ensure that all students are exposed to female faculty in the first year. In addition, because a "high level of comfort with classmates" is a strong factor in encouraging class participation for all students, but especially for women, faculty should consider ways to encourage informal interaction among students in a class early in each academic term. The administration should encourage and support such efforts, and the Student Bar Association should continue its efforts to develop a high level of camaraderie among students. Our student members of the Committee cite lunch invitations, potlucks, and similar social activities initiated by faculty, as well as faculty acceptance of student invitations to activities such as birthday parties or baby showers for students, as useful steps toward this goal. Many law firms have discovered the importance of social events in promoting office morale — the same is true in school. Our data show that women enter law school with a greater interest in working in public-sector and public-service jobs. Although this interest declines for both men and women during law school, a significant and disproportionately greater number of our female students continue to seek public-interest jobs. The School of Law already has a strong Public Interest Law Association and the School of Law's Career Services office is working to serve these students more effectively. That effort should continue and be supported by the administration. Law Students, Gender, and Mental Health Our survey results confirm the findings of other studies that law school significantly increases levels of depression among law students and that it does so by the time the first round of grades comes out.19 Before law school, significantly fewer of our prospective students (five percent) than the general population (nine percent) suffer from depression, as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory. By spring term of the first year of law school, 15 percent of the students suffer from depression. That level continues among second and third-year law students. However, 85 percent of our students remain unaffected by depression. We found that women are more likely to become depressed than men, again a finding that is consistent with previous research at other schools.20 One new and interesting aspect of our data is that, at the UW School of Law, women who are single and not dating are significantly more likely to become depressed during law school. Student members of the committee hypothesized that women may be more affected by their single status than men, because the larger culture and the mass media communicate stronger expectations for women than for men that being partnered is the norm. This is probably the area in which the School of Law can have the least effect, but we suspect that generalized law-school efforts to build community might mitigate this effect. Because this was a gender study with a focus on the experience of women, our recommendations address measures likely to improve the law-school environment for women. We believe that many of these recommendations, such as attention to the range of learning styles, and increasing levels of comfort with classmates, will help men as well as women and support our increasingly diverse student body. Implications for Legal Education and the Profession We recognize, however, that in some areas what works best for most women may not work best for some men. This raises three important questions. First, are there ways to channel the energy of students who thrive under the traditional Socratic teaching method and prefer a more aggressive, competitive atmosphere, while still creating a learning environment that supports students with other preferences? Second, to what extent are competition and aggression central to or necessary for excellent performance by lawyers? Finally, can we guide aggression and competition in ways that do not undermine efforts in the profession to avoid destructively unbridled adversarial behavior in the litigation process? We do not claim to have answers to these questions, but we hope that posing them can move us toward solutions. With the entry of women into the legal profession in large numbers, observers interested in the progress of women in the profession began evaluating both law schools and legal employers. Studies of women in the profession show that women have made significant strides in entering the judiciary (especially in Washington state), the public sector, and private practice. Women have encountered more difficulty gaining entry into elite corporate law firms, especially into partnerships and positions of power, though we see signs of progress in that area. For women of color, these difficulties are exacerbated. The resistance of many law firms and other institutions to accommodate women's traditionally greater family responsibilities appears to be a major factor in these difficulties.21 In both law schools and the broader profession, we can identify a common predicate for creating environments in which women will succeed. We must abandon the long-standing feminist debate between "equal treatment," under which women are treated identically to men, and "special treatment,"22 under which women's biological differences from men are acknowledged and women's ability to become pregnant and bear children "accommodated." Instead, we must recognize that our existing institutions were created to accommodate the lives and needs of the men who established and attended them. Thus, they often incorporate a "male norm," an assumption that the lives of men from certain backgrounds define what is expected and possible. Different groups and individuals now inhabit these institutions — women as well as men, men and women of color as well as white men, members of the working class as well as the wealthy, men and women returning to school after raising a family or pursuing another career, as well as students fresh out of college. To create institutions that respond to the needs of all these groups requires us to recognize their needs, and to recognize that their needs will vary. To do so will displace the historical male norm, but it is a necessary form of equal treatment.
NOTES 11. Jean C. Love, "Twenty Questions on the Status of Women Students in Your Law School," 11 Wisconsin Women's Law Journal, 405 (1997) 13. That was the year that Congress prohibited sex discrimination in the hiring practices of educational institutions pursuant to amendments to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 16. Joan M. Krauskopf, "Touching the Elephant: Perceptions of Gender Issues in Nine Law Schools," 44 Journal of Legal Education, 311, 314 (1994).
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