Girl Talk

Twice a year I have that Academy Awards moment when the envelope arrives in my inbox and my hands start to shake. An image of Sally Fields pixelates in my mind as I wonder, “Did they like me? Did they really like me?” It is a humiliating image, but there it is, every January and May, year after year, as much as I fear and despise it.

Clinical teaching is a bare your guts kind of experience. Raw and intense, our students see us at our best and our worst. They see us at our clients’ funerals, holding our clients while they vomit after losing custody of their young children, cranking out briefs side-by-side with our students at 3:00 a.m., and being berated by judges–on the record, no less. It is not always a pretty picture.

Despite being sincere and hard-working and deeply devoted to supporting our students as they emerge as attorneys, many of us hold our envelopes in our hands and wonder what our course evaluations will say. What did they really think of this exhausting clinical course that is so very real–immersed in real life and real learning and real law?

A pattern has emerged such that I have come to expect much of what I read—the high expectations I have for my students, my directness, and intensity. What I was not expecting this semester was the warning about my, shall I call it “girl talk”? For years, I have very consciously and openly talked about gender equality both in and out of the classroom. I am familiar with the voluminous research that shows the inequality that emerges between genders in academic settings from a young age.

Girls are called on less, speak for shorter periods, and are interrupted more than boys. This gender inequality begins at least in elementary school and continues on into college and even graduate school, before embedding itself solidly into lifelong workforce inequality, as demonstrated by both pay and position.

The issues created by gender discrimination are multifold. Not only is it a violation of our female students’ rights, and compromises their learning, it will have a significant economic impact on them individually, on organizations that fail to fully engage their minds and professional energies and talent, and on society overall. 

And so I talk about these issues openly and directly when gendered dynamics appear in my classrooms or clinics. For example, both in and out of class, I look for discussion participation that is representative of the population by gender (and race). If the class is fifty percent male and fifty percent female, I expect the discussion to be approximately representative of those figures. When discussions become lopsided, I expressly invite members of the underrepresented group to talk more, and often draw the students’ attention to gendered dynamics and their negative consequences.

In clinic, I often witness gendered dynamics in client interviews or weekly meetings. It is not unusual, especially at the beginning of the semester, for me to observe client interviews where a female student is thoroughly prepared, sometimes more prepared than her male partner, and yet he does most of the talking. I see female students who talk quietly or hesitantly or infrequently, sometimes using a high pitched voice, accompanied by a sorority head tilt, and a few filler words such as “like.” Afterwards, we debrief and explore together why the female student did not participate more actively in the interview, especially if she is lead on the matter or was the most prepared. We work on voice and body language and volume for both men and women, but I witness these issues with my female students more.

In our weekly meetings, the students prepare the agendas and facilitate the discussion. I usually remain silent about roles until and unless we are in our third meeting and the female student still has not led or facilitated the meeting, which happens with at least one team almost every semester. We talk about the importance of attorneys conveying leadership and confidence, when and how best to demonstrate these traits, and why and how women and men need to support each other in developing professional personas and leadership skills.

And yet, there it was, at the very end of my very last evaluation. The anonymous student wrote that he or she did not say this or necessarily agree with this point of feedback, but thought it was important for me to know that another student said that, in advocating for women, I needed to be careful not to create a situation that placed male students at a disadvantage.

Does trying to provide and nurture and support equal participation by our female students place our male students at a disadvantage? Or is it the advantage of inequality that some are afraid of losing? In trying to rid our classrooms of gender bias, are we creating a classroom that some of our students feel are biased against them? These are just a few of the questions that I have been asking myself since nervously opening my envelope two weeks ago, now wondering if we should stop talking openly and directly about these issues.  

Or maybe the issue is that there is not enough “girl talk” in clinics and law schools and higher education. As Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant pointed out in their December editorial in the New York Times, when people are told that discrimination is widespread, it can actually make discrimination worse by legitimizing it. The only way to actual reduce discrimination is by acknowledging its widespread existence and then changing the message slightly to add, “and most people want to overcome their biases.” But, do we?