More on Gender and the Harvard Law Review:
Over at The Conglomerate, Christine Hurt is looking into why recent Volumes of the Harvard Law Review have mostly published the works of male authors. One obvious trend in the HLR's publication track, Christine notes, is the very strong preference for articles in constitutional law:
VC readers, what are your thoughts? I would be particularly interested to hear from former or current articles editors who may remember (or remember the absence of) any such trend. As always, civil and respectful comments only.
Given the roughly equal numbers of female to male assistant professors, I would suspect that law reviews receive an equal number of papers authored by men and women. So, does a ConLaw bias have gender effects? Or a bias toward well-known, established authors? These numbers roughly correlate with the percentage of female full professors.That raises an interesting question — do law reviews receive a roughly equal number of papers authored by men and women? Christine assumes so, but I am less sure. I remember my reaction when I first saw Brian Leiter's 2002 list of the most-cited law professors who entered teaching since 1992: to my surprise, every one of the top 20 most cited professors in that list is male. There are a number of possible explanations for that rather troubling (at least to me) result, but one might be a difference between the sheer number of submissions from men and women, either generally or in the smaller category of more prolific academics.
VC readers, what are your thoughts? I would be particularly interested to hear from former or current articles editors who may remember (or remember the absence of) any such trend. As always, civil and respectful comments only.
Related Posts (on one page):
- More on Gender and the Harvard Law Review:
- Race, Gender, and the Harvard Law Review:
In Volume 114 of YLJ, which concluded in May, 11 of 13 articles and essays (i.e., nonsolicited professional pieces) were written by men.
More disturbing is the trend in Notes and Comments -- which are student-written pieces and, therefore, evaluated completely anonymously until the moment of acceptance. Of the Notes, 10 of 13 were written by men; of Comments, 9 of 11 were by men.
(Comments can only be submitted by Journal members, of whom about 60% are men. Notes, though, can be submitted by any student.)
If women are submitting less, though, that's problematic. Perhaps Christine has insight here.
There was a similar complaint at the start of 2004 about 3/4 of the books reviewed by the NYT being by men. I determined that 3/4 of the Amazon 100 were written by men so there was nothing unusual about the NYT outcome.
See here:
http://tinyurl.com/8yyn7
That might account for being drawn to masculine styles of writing (if there is such a thing).
So if that holds up, there's certainly a skew in the authorship on the order of 2:1.
But not nearly as big a skew as what we ended up publishing. Of the articles and essays in our volume, about a fifth are by women. (My guess is that book reviews are at least as skewed; so are notes, despite a membership around 55/45 m/f.)
I confess that, until I read this post, I had never thought about this, and I find it puzzling. Much of it, I think, is probably a bias in favor of senior scholars, where there's still plenty of gender disparity. In fact, if you subtract the senior-authored pieces from our volume, the ratio of junior-authored pieces is exactly 2:1, which tracks the submissions pool. All of the senior-authored pieces were by men, but sample size here is getting a bit small for generalizations (and we certainly made plenty of offers to senior women authors that got shopped up, though I don't have records handy from which to quantify). Still, I find it odd and disturbing that there's such a skew in the submissions pool, which certainly doesn't look dominated by senior scholars (although again, I can't easily quantify that).
Would be nice if, someday soon, law review article selection were to adopt the norms of most of the rest of the scholarly world, among which is blind review. Not suggesting that only bias in selction can explain these numbers, but it'd be nice to rule it out.
Smardz paraphrases a neuropsychiatrist she's worked with: "Think of a man as carrying a quiverful of arrows. When he spies a target, he lets fly with the whole caboodle. Most of his arrows will miss the bull's-eye, but one is likely to hit. And that's the one people will remember -- and applaud. A woman, though, proceeds slowly and considers carefully. Only when she's pretty sure she has a perfect shot does she send off a single arrow. And she hits the mark! Amazing! But . . . too bad. The guy's already walked off with the prize."
My instinct (based only on anecdote) is that this is largely accurate (and no doubt others besides this unnamed neuropsychiatrist have made the same point); of course, why it might be true (biology, sociology, psychology, etc.) I leave to others.
Of the untenured professors at my school, it's clear that the men tend to generate much more work. One female professor has worked carefully on one article all year, while a male cranks them out, while at the same time working on a book, writing amicus briefs, etc. What's the difference? For one thing, males tend to be much more amenable to working all the time and having no social life. I'm at the school most weekends, and I never seen a female professor there. They're probably having fun. But there are a few male professors who are always there. Their entire lives are work.
For what it's worth, I'm a female student and I plan to work as little as possible once I graduate. 1. I need to make up for these three years of hell, and 2. Sitting on my ass going blind staring at my computer all day is not the way I want to spend every waking minute of my life. While a healthy majority of students of both genders share my attitude, the masochists who DO enjoy a life of all work and no play are overwhelmingly men.
Maybe men have better titles?
Our department was 5 people — 2 women and 3 men. In the entire year, we published <b>3</b> actual articles by women: one was a co-authored piece (with a man) and one was a response to another piece we published in the same issue. That's out of 13 substantial articles and 2 written lectures, or 20%.
In our Symposium issue (which I was not counting in the above statistics) we had 2 females out of 13 writers. Even "worse".
But here's the interesting data:
4 out of 12 published comments were by women, and the comments department was almost entirely female. HOWEVER... this is NOT consistent with the data about professors because the majority of people on Law Review itself (which was decided entirely by a write on) were, as I recall, women. Assuming my recall is correct, that means that a majority of the comments reviewed by the comments department were by women. Yet they selected men over women 2 to 1.
Maybe it really is all about the titles.