Abstract
Women have been attending law school at approximately equal rates as men for decades and began comprising a greater percentage of law school entrants than men in 2016. Yet, men continue to hold a solid majority of leadership positions across the legal field: from seats on judicial benches to podiums in front of law school classrooms. This paper examines one under-evaluated, yet critical gender gap within the legal profession: legal scholarship—specifically legal scholarship published by the flagship law reviews at the top twenty law schools. This article presents original research demonstrating that law reviews might be perpetuating the law professor gender gap because, for the five-year period studied, the law reviews published, on average, twice as many articles with male authors than with female authors.
Based on this evidence, this article highlights points along the article review process that could be subject to implicit biases and suggests ways for those biases to be noticed and minimized. Who gets to speak and whose ideas are heard, matters. Currently men get to speak, and be listened to, more than women in legal scholarship.[1] This article seeks to demonstrate why this should, and how this can, concretely change.
[1]. Nancy Leong, Discursive Disparities, 8 FIU L. Rev. 369, 370 (2013) (“Concretely, the [discursive] disparity has negative consequences for women’s lives, careers, and personal well-being. More broadly, the disparity distorts our discourse by conforming that discourse to male perspectives.”).
Recommended Citation
Shontee M. Pant,
Calculating the Gender Gap in Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Study,
65
St. Louis U. L.J.
(2020).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lj/vol65/iss1/9