Despite equal representation among incoming class members and virtually no difference in law school admissions criteria like LSAT scores and GPA,[1] female students are lagging behind on many normative indicators of success, such as membership to the Harvard Law Review and graduating with Latin Honors.
Last spring, the Shatter the Ceiling Committee of the Women’s Law Association tracked gender representation on the Harvard Law Review (HLR), Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (HLAB), and the Board of Student Advisors (BSA). Membership to these organizations is highly selective and the groups are frequently viewed as “honor societies” within the HLS community, making them approximate measures of normative law school success. Shatter’s analysis found that after controlling for gender representation in the classes of 2016 and 2017, significantly more men than women were editors of HLR (c2 = 6.721, P = 0.01) while significantly more females than males were members of HLAB (c2 = 6.933, P = 0.008).[2] The difference in gender representation on the BSA was not statistically significant.[3]
More concerning was the finding that 36.86% of women in the Class of 2015 graduated with Latin Honors, compared to 63.14% of men.[4] This difference was statistically significant (c2 = 12.37, P < 0.001),[5] and the gap between male and female students has only widened over the past 10 years, despite awareness of the issue.[6] The full write-up of our findings can be found here.
During the 2016-2017 academic year, the Shatter the Ceiling Committee plans to continue its work investigating and combating gender inequalities at Harvard and elsewhere. We plan to continue tracking disparities inside and outside the classroom, and to branch out into comparison studies between Harvard and other law schools. The Committee also hopes to plan events that foster conversations among Harvard women and women outside HLS, both at other law schools and in the working world.
[1] Dev A. Patel, In HLS Classes, Women Fall Behind, The Harvard Crimson (May 8, 2013), http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/5/8/law-school-gender-classroom/?page=4.
[2] The Women’s Law Association Shatter the Ceiling Committee, Gender Disparities at HLS, The Harvard Record (Apr. 3, 2016), http://hlrecord.org/2016/04/gender-disparities-at-hls/.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] See Adam Neufeld, Costs of an Outdated Pedagogy? Study on Gender at Harvard Law School, Am. U.J. Gender, Soc. Pol’y & L. 511, 537 (2005) (finding that from 1997-2004, 53% of male students and 45% of female students graduated from HLS with Latin Honors).
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