Harvard Law Is Finally Dealing With Its Huge Sexism Problem

Harvard's business school recently completed a groundbreaking experiment to make the school less hostile to women. Harvard's insanely competitive law school is just starting to come to terms with the same problem.

In a frank mini-documentary released in March, a new group called the Shatter the Ceiling coalition spelled out the problem in stark terms.

Some female law students describe Harvard as a male-dominated place that can intimidate brilliant women and make them underperform.

"It was the best-known secret on campus that women just can't do as well, the way this school is structured," Harvard Law graduate Lena Silver said in that video.

Incoming Harvard Law women have LSAT scores and undergraduate grades that are just as high as their male counterparts, but then women start to fall behind. Here are some key points from that video and a related Harvard Crimson article:

• Just 20% of students from the Class of 2012 on the Harvard Law Review were women.
• Only 30% of the school's magna cum laude grads were women.
• Between 2006 and 2012, just 29% of Harvard Law grads who clerked for the Supreme Court were women.

What's more, women who appeared in the Shatter the Ceiling documentary said they felt far less confident at Harvard Law than they had as undergrads. I spoke to one female 2013 Harvard Law graduate who had nothing to do with the group but also felt the same way.

"It was interesting to hear that other women had the same kind of crisis of confidence that I had," said that graduate, who preferred to remain anonymous. That 2013 grad said she often felt like her ideas were shot down when she did speak in class. It didn't help that she had only male professors her first year.

Jean Ripley, a third-year law student who co-chairs the coalition, told me she felt "very silent" and "very isolated" her first year of law school. She's actually a loquacious person, she said.

Sexism At Harvard Law Is Not A New Problem

Shatter the Ceiling has history on its side in arguing that there's a sexism problem at Harvard Law.

It was apparently a problem in 2004, when a study found men at the school were much more likely to speak in class than women. Men also tended to get higher grades than women in 1L courses. The study found 31% of grades for men were A- or better compared to 25% of women's grades.

Twelve years before that study came out, a "sexism battle" erupted at Harvard after members of the law review wrote an ugly parody of a slain feminist law professor's article. That professor, Mary Joe Frug, had been brutally stabbed on the streets of Cambridge.

"Postmodern feminists represent a diverse group of people," the parody by the "Rigor-Mortis Professor of Law" reportedly stated. "Some of us are intellectuals. Many are politically committed. Most are disillusioned. Others are just plain horny. But there is one thing that we have in common: we have no sense of humor."

After the incident, 20 of the school's 59 tenured professors signed letters criticizing the school for creating a "hostile environment" by failing to hire more women and minority professors and asserting that Harvard was pervaded by attitudes of "sexism and misogyny," according to the New York Times.

Of the 59 tenured professors at the time, only five were women.

As of last spring, 17 of Harvard Law's 92 tenure-track faculty were women. Some things are getting better it seems, but apparently not fast enough.

Fixing An Old Problem

Nobody really knows why women still feel so silenced at Harvard Law, though the mostly male faculty is an obvious culprit. The famed Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier has also pinned some of the blame on a "toxic" environment that isn't good for anybody. Women are the "canaries in the coal mine" whose discomfort is a sign that something is wrong at the law school, Guinier said in the Shatter the Ceiling video.

Some people say the Socratic method - in which professors cold-call students and arguably interrogate them - is also to blame for women's relatively poor performance at Harvard Law.

"It's the worst thing in the world," Jessica R. Jensen told the Crimson. "It forces you to talk like a man."

Both of these explanations, however, have been criticized as sexist themselves. The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto attacked Guinier's canary metaphor for allegedly implying women were "frail." Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz told the Crimson that "it's an extreme form of sexism" to suggest women law students can't cope with the rigors of the Socratic method.

Despite these criticisms, the Shatter coalition has gotten a largely positive response. The Harvard Law Review has already put in place a "sex affirmative action plan" that has pretty dramatically increased the number of women editors. Nearly 38% of the members of the class of 2015 on the Harvard Law Review are women.

The Shatter the Ceiling group is also researching the problem with its own focus groups and experiments, and it's been collecting data to figure out the sources of sexism. Among their early insights, Shatter has found data suggesting that women fare better in smaller classes, and that they're more likely to speak in class if professors wait a few seconds before calling on somebody.

While the Shatter the Ceiling movement can't fix sexism at the school overnight, its mere existence has made Ripley feel less alone.

"Of course, I can only speak from my personal experience, but personally, learning that I was not the only person who felt alienated to be somewhat de-alienating," she told me in an email message. "In terms of the general attitude, I do think that with every new face that joins our movement, there is even more positive energy."

The law school could also take some cues from Harvard's business school. The B-school reportedly took measures to make sure professors weren't biased in their grading and provided coaching for female professors who weren't tenured yet.

By the end of the experiment, women at the business school felt that "Hey, people like me are an equal part of this institution," Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a longtime professor, told The New York Times.

As the recent Harvard Law School graduate told me, "Why don't we have something like that at the law school?"