Title: Are We There Yet?: Progress Toward Gender-Neutral Legal Education
Abstract: Abstract: Although men and women enter law school at the same rate with similar credentials, studies demonstrate that men consistently out-perform women in law school. This Article examines whether the performance gap present at other top law schools exists between men and women at Boston College Law School (BC Law). Analysis of admissions data, performance statistics, and results from a 2010 survey tend to demonstrate that women at BC Law defy traditional statistics, performing just as well as their male counterparts, if not better. This Article posits that BC Law's promotion of a collegial and collaborative learning environment may be linked to the narrowed gap in gender experience. Though women are well served by BC Law, it is not perfect. This Article proposes changes that can be implemented by BC Law, and other law schools around the country, to level the playing field for female law students.IntroductionJustice may be blind, but the nation's leading law schools have proven to be anything but gender-blind. Despite the fact that women are entering law school at the same rate as men, and have nearly iden- tical entry-level credentials, dozens of studies show that women consis- tently underperform men in law school.1Women have undeniably come a long way in the legal profession. In 1872, in Bradwell v. Illinois, the Supreme Court held that it was consti- tutional for a state to exclude women from the practice of law.2 Justice Bradley's concurrence exclaimed that it was repugnant for women to have careers distinct from their husbands because their proper role was within the domestic sphere, thereby forcing women to begin state-by- state battles for admission to the legal profession.3 In 1869, Iowa was the first state to admit a woman to practice law, and over the next eighty-one years the number of admitting states slowly rose such that, in 1950, all states had opened their courtrooms to female lawyers.4 Women were admitted to federal practice with the passage of the Lockwood Bill in 1879.5 One hundred years after being admitted to practice federally, however, women still constituted only 5% of all practicing attorneys.6 By 1980 the profession was only 12.4% female and as late as 1995 women comprised only 25% of the nation's attorneys.7Although nearly inextricably linked today, the tie between the prac- tice of law and law school attendance was much more tenuous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8 In the early 1900s, while hundreds of schools continued to be all-male, and only a few were co- educational, there was only one all-female law school.9 The first woman to graduate from law school, Ada A. Kepley, graduated from Union Col- lege of Law in Chicago, Illinois in 1870.10 While western law schools be- gan accommodating female students, eastern law schools, particularly the Ivy Leagues, were reluctant to admit women.11 Yale did not admit women until 1919, Columbia not until 1927, and Harvard waited until 1950 to allow women to matriculate.12Although women have been permitted to attend law school for over a century, few women exercised this right until recently. During the 1950s and 1960s, women constituted only 3% to 4% of law school classes.13 Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, however, women's matriculation at law schools increased exponentially, reaching 20% by 1974 and nearly 43% by 1995.14 It was not until 2001 that women were finally admitted at approximately the same rate as men.15Women attending law school in the early, male-dominated decades found school to be an uncomfortable environment, with some even finding it intolerable.16 Women were overtly harassed, alienated, and psychologically damaged.17 Although most instances of express sexual harassment have disappeared, female law students still face covert dis- crimination, systematic disadvantages, and even hostile learning envi- ronment[s].18Boston College Law School (BC Law) did not admit women until 1940. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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