by Jyotsna Sreenivasan
Women law students at the University of Pennsylvania face a hostile atmosphere of harassing comments from male students, and an intimidating first-year teaching method that may favor men, according to a new study of University of Pennsylvania law students. Perhaps because of this atmosphere, women who enter law school with identical credentials to their male classmates nevertheless find themselves behind men when it comes to law school grades.
While almost 14% of men law students are in the top 10% of their firstyear class, only 5% of women first-year students are in the top 10%. By the third year, 13% of men and 7% of women are in the top 10%. These discrepancies are not explained away by other factors such as age or undergraduate major.
The lower grades of women law students are not unique to the University of Pennsylvania - another ongoing study of 6,000 law students by the Law School Admissions Council also documents lower grades for women students.
The University of Pennsylvania study, entitled "Becoming Gentlemen: Women's Experiences at One Ivy League Law School" and published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, was led by law professor Lani Guinier, a leading civil rights lawyer (#whose nomination as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights was derailed by the right wing and by President Clinton.
The study suggests that the hostile atmosphere of law school causes women to lose confidence, which in turn affects their grades. For example, some women law students who voluntarily spoke in class reported being harassed by their male classmates, who hissed, laughed, and called the women "man-hating lesbians" and "femi-nazi dykes." In addition, more women than men felt intimidated and alienated by the adversarial, "boot-camp" nature of first-year law classes. Many women felt that male professors favored male students, and women often found it difficult to approach professors outside of class to ask questions.
To remedy the situation, the study recommends that law schools rethink the widely-used adversarial teaching style, and implement a more diverse range of teaching styles incorporating mediation and alternative dispute resolution, which are techniques used by actual lawyers in their work.